BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"Time is the fire in which we burn." Gene Rodenberry.

So deep in my psyche that it’s normally hidden from view there lurks a reactionary grammarian whose blind hatred of the split infinitive (as in “to boldly go”) engendered my immediate dislike of the Star Trek series when it first ran on NBC in 1966. There were other reasons, of course, including the liberal intergalactic imperialism of Captain Kirk and the crew of his spaceship, suspiciously christened as the Enterprise. Of course the actual history of the entertainment industry proved me wrong (or very badly out of touch, which in popular entertainment terms is the same thing as ‘wrong’), for Star Trek became a trademark, the ‘Trekkies’ (Star Trek’s devoted followers) became legion. We owe all that to Gene Rodenberry, in full Eugene Wesley Rodenberry, born in El Paso, TX, on August 19, 1921, and moved to Los Angeles in 1923. There he became a boy who reinvented himself through reading pulp fiction set just about anywhere other than Los Angeles, but in real life he looked like following his dad into the police force when WWII intervened, forcing on him a different reinvention as a USAAC pilot (of B-17 bombers). Then came piloting for Pan American, then a longish stint as an LA cop. Along with all this Rodenberry rejected religion (comprehensively), developed a liberal political philosophy, and (latterly) started writing pulp fiction and TV scripts of all sorts, including quite a few westerns. He enjoyed modest successes, but his politics occasionally got in his way (he lost one series because he insisted on writing in roles for black actors). Out of all this came Star Trek, which those not debilitated by delusions of grammatical purity could see as a “space western.” Even so, it’s salutary to remember that the original series didn’t actually do so very well, dropping out of primetime orbit in 1967 and finally crashing in 1969, leaving Rodenberry’s company millions in debt and the man himself declaring that he would never write for television again. But Rodenberry kept plugging away, and circumstance (not least his faithful ‘Trekkies,’ speaking of religions) conspired to make Star Trek into a major-league franchise in the business of entertainment. ©

[Stanley]

"One judges the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." Goethe.

With nearly a lifetime’s immersion in early 20th-century English light fiction (e.g. Wodehouse, Allingham, Priestley, Chesterton), I may be excused for thinking the upper classes full to bursting with bumbling imbeciles, eccentric wastrels, and surpassingly silly reactionaries, but once in a while I run into someone who seems impeccably armored at every point. Such a one was Reginald Lindsey Benson, sportsman, war hero, diplomat, and banker. He was born the second child (of five) of a successful merchant banker and a landed heiress, in Mayfair, London (of course), on August 20, 1889. His formal education ended after only a year at Oxford, but he seems to have learned a great deal, not least about cricket and polo. Against his father’s wishes he took a commission in a Guards regiment, and in his military career (1909-1923) performed admirably whether at imperial ceremonial or trench warfare. He emerged from WWI gassed, grievously wounded, and festooned with a UK Military Cross, the Croix de Guerre, and the Légion d’honneur. He then took up portfolios as full time merchant banker and occasional diplomat, one of the first British agents to strike up trade agreements with the Soviets, then later (after the Dunkirk evacuation) sent to Washington as military attaché and to keep a Churchillian eye on the Nazi proclivities of the then British ambassador, Lord Halifax. Through it all he was a brilliant polo player (and pony trainer and sheep breeder), and in addition a highly successful merchant banker. As senior partner in the Benson firm (now Kleinwort Benson), he is said to have known every employee, and he saw to it that every one of them was kept on, apparently at full salary or wages, through the depths of the Great Depression. His American wife Leslie, meanwhile, kept him perfectly in tune with the latest Cole Porter songs (and they worked together for decades as guiding spirits in the English Speaking Union). I suspect I would have found his politics supremely objectionable, but otherwise Sir Rex Benson (he was knighted 1958, died 1968) lived a life several cuts above any member of Bertie Wooster’s Drone’s Club, or Campion, or Lord Peter Wimsey. He was a Flambeau without noticeable criminal tendencies. ©

[Stanley]

". . . America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine." Annette Kolodny, 1979. -

Americans’ (that is, the immigrants, not the natives) relentless exploitation of nature has deep roots, and it is tuned to almost perfect pitch by our current president. Annette Kolodny, born on August 21, 1941, in what might be called the unpromising environs of Governor’s Island in New York harbor, spent most of her scholarly life analyzing this fatal proclivity, notably in two books, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1979) and The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984). In sequence, these works formulated and then sharpened her theoretical focus on what has become known as ecofeminism, very roughly speaking the idea that our rape of nature originates in the fact and in the psychology of patriarchy. As a literary metaphor it’s compelling, backed up as it is by the gender specificity of our language about taming the wilderness: penetrating the Appalachian barrier, piercing the prairie sod with our steel plows, appropriating nature as property and making it bloom with the flowers we want, realizing the capital value of our virgin soil. As an historical explanation I have my doubts, but when I became a dean I was impressed enough with Kolodny’s sharp intellect that I quickly snapped up her Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the 20th Century (1998), a reflection arising mainly from her experience as dean at the University of Arizona. Little did I know then of her life sufferings, first from rheumatoid arthritis. That was diagnosed in 1959, pained her long, and was what finally killed her in 2019. And then, secondly, came the difficulties of securely establishing her academic career against the dual handicaps of being a radical and being a woman. In the process she won (circa 1979) what was then a record lawsuit against the University of New Hampshire. I don’t for one moment suggest that her personal struggles explain her ecofeminist interpretations, but her whole story makes me wish she’d have lived long enough to finish her final project, a study of the origins and course of white nationalism. I am sure that that, too, would have been a very sobering read. ©.

[Stanley]

"The way Will Moore taught me, and the way I play it, the blues is just something different." John Lee Hooker.

“Bogeyman” has a fascinating etymology but a fairly common meaning, something with which to frighten the children, a ‘bugaboo’. That’s the way the decade of my coming of age, the 1960s, has been used for years, mainly by the American right, but a different view is liberating. Among its many virtues was its discovery, or rather its publicizing, of the real origins of modern music. In turn, that re-discovering further changed popular genres while it widened the audiences and enhanced the incomes of a host of artists. One of the vessels of this revival was the American Folk Blues Festival, the brainchild of a couple of German promoters, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, who realized that the musics (plural) were popular enough in Europe that it would be a Good Thing to bring genuine performers over, in concert and en masse, as a feast of American popular culture. Their cast lists (1962-1970) read like a who’s who of folk, blues, and jazz: Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Rosetta Tharpe, Big Mama Thornton, et cetera. Not least among them was John Lee Hooker, whom we now think was born on August 22, 1912, Tallahatchie County, in the sovereign state of Mississippi which did not think black people should be allowed to do very much at all, except labor in white men’s fields and sing in black churches. John Lee learned to do both, for his father was a sharecropper and a Baptist preacher. But from age 11 he learned a different music from his stepfather, Willie Moore, a blues singer, and then in the Great Migration of WWII he carried all his arts to Detroit where he kept a Ford factory clean and late and night and on weekends he sang about it in the black clubs of downtown Detroit. He made some recordings from the late 40s, but in the common fate of “race music” players he never made much from them. His participation in the American Folk Blues Festival changed all that, and he lived out his last four decades (he died in 2001) in better clothes, nicer cars, and five houses with creature comforts suitable to a genius performer, omposer, and lyricist. He lives on, too. Those inspired by his English concerts included Van Morrison, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger—not to mention Hooker’s own children and grandchildren. The 1960s did John Lee Hooker justice, and for that the decade deserves some credit. ©

[Stanley]

"Many people have tasted Lord Woolton pie and pronounced it good." The London Times, April 26, 1941.

Britons do not fondly remember wartime rationing, which on some items extended through the peace and into the 1950s. But there are a few (killjoys?) who note that Britons as a whole have never, before or since, eaten such healthy diets and—at the same time—gained so little weight. Among the many government-recommended dishes were Woolton Pies, combining leftovers (mainly veggies but if you were lucky a scrap of meat) with flour and a bit of lard, baking it as a pie, sinking it in brown gravy, and calling it a feast. The pie was named after Lord Woolton, made a hereditary peer in 1939 to enable government to take advantage of his organizational skills. It was suggested that he take the title Lord Windermere, for by then he had a summer place in the Lake District, but his good wife Maud Smith did not want to be called “Lady Windermere” nor, apparently, to have a fan. Baron Woolton was born Frederick James Marquis in Salford, Manchester, on August 23, 1883. He was an only child whose working-class parents wanted him to rise in the world, and rise he did, through Manchester Grammar School and a rather good science degree then an external MA in economics, both from Manchester University. His business successes were always tied to sociological studies and volunteer work, and with his trademark red tie many assumed he was a socialist. Indeed he had a lifelong commitment to the welfare state, partly as an expression of his devout Unitarianism, but he held both in harness—a kind of troika—with a devotion to entrepreneurial capitalism that fueled his rise through the ranks of the famous John Lewis stores to become director in 1928 and chairman in 1936. His work in the First war made him a natural selection for the Second one, During WWII he held government posts as a non-party peer, a friend of both Churchill’s and Atlee’s (whom he had met in social work circles), but after Atlee’s Labour landslide of 1945 Woolton migrated into the Conservative party, which (as party chairman) he remade (temporarily, as it happened) into a consensus-minded, progressively inclined, and remarkably successful capitalist coalition. His death in 1964 spared him the Thatcher experience. As for the Woolton Pie, it was replaced in peacetime by the traditional meat pies, of which, in my view, the supreme expression is the ‘steak & kidney,’ a calorific wonder with hardly a vegetable in it and sadly absent from American markets. ©

[Stanley]

The sad tale of Eustace the Monk, the pirate who lost his head.

‘Eustace’ as a given name has pleasant Greek origins and a positive association with an early Roman imperial general who martyred himself for a new faith and became a Christian saint. But it’s fallen out of use these days, perhaps because it sounds a bit Victorian, as in that Eustace Tilley who became, willy-nilly, the foppish, soon-to-be-shocked trademark of The New Yorker magazine. But in medieval times, the name Eustace struck terror among coastal fisherfolk and traders on both sides of the English Channel. It belonged to that notorious pirate Eustace the Monk, who (bravely, we are told) met his bloody end on August 24, 1217. It is in the nature of medieval monks who became pirates that we don’t know too much about Eustace, but (born circa 1170) he seems to have sprung from a bad class, his likely father being Baudoin Busket, a Boulogne baron of dubious character. Eustace—not an eldest son—may have wanted a different life. At least he became a genuine monk, a Benedictine, for a time; but he left the monastery first to avenge his father’s death and latterly, after a short career as a rent collector (seneschal, actually) for another lord, took to the highways and byways of the Boulogne region as a kind of Robin Hood figure, popular with many folk for his pranks and depredations, usually directed at the nobility, and possibly transferring some of his loot to the peasantry. But around 1212 Eustace’s fame went to his head and he got involved in bigger things, first sea piracy and then in French plots to install King Phillip II—or his son Louis—on the English throne. Eustace commanded the ships that were to ferry Louis to (probably) Sandwich, on the Dover coast, but he ran into a better sea captain and was taken prisoner (after hiding unsuccessfully in his bilge). According to the chronicler, Eustace might and perhaps should have been held as an honored captive, perhaps for ransom, but his piratical activities (some of them in the service of England’s bad King John) had made him extremely unpopular with the old salts manning the English fleet, and he was only given the choice of where to be beheaded, on ship or on shore. Sadly, we do not certainly know his choice, but a surviving tapestry suggests that he lost his head while still at sea. ©.

[Stanley]

'I am a shoemaker, a citizen, a free man and a freeholder'. "Crispin," January 16, 1772, sometimes attributed to George R. T. Hewes.

Lately Americans have reawakened to the political importance of the mob, witness President Trump’s absurd overcounting of his inauguration crowd or, for others, the women’s marches and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. It’s good to remember that our nation was mob-born, ordinary folk taking to the Boston streets to pelt soldiers with snowballs (and worse) and then joining with gentry to vandalize a ship and dump private property into the drink. One who took part in both those mob actions was George Robert Twelves Hewes, born on August 25, 1742. Like Ben Franklin, he was a younger son of a worthy but poor ship’s chandler. Unlike Ben, he did not make a lot of money or become a founding father of a nation. He was a cobbler, often in debt (indeed once in debtors’ prison). But George and his wife Sarah, a washerwoman, raised 11 kids to adulthood, and George played his part in the American Revolution, not only in the Boston riots but as a courier for the Boston Committee of Correspondence and then nearly two years in the Massachusetts militia and in the Continental Army. Come the war of 1812 he tried to enlist again, but by then they didn’t want a short (5’1”) and wizened septuagenarian. Truth be told, George R. T. Hewes was never a very eminent hero (he even had trouble getting his revolutionary war pension), but he lived long enough to be celebrated as one, rediscovered in the 1830s as one who’d fought the good old fight and then had lived long enough to tell youngsters about it. He was rediscovered yet again, in the 1970s, by scholars. So we know quite a bit about George Robert Twelves Hewes, cobbler by trade and hero by nature. He sounds an interesting troublemaker, too. He remembered that as the revolutionary agitation began, he had to carry his subversive messages to the service entrance of John Hancock’s Boston mansion. Before the end of it all, he said, he was marching in through the front door, a citizen among citizens. His portrait (not an imagined one, but gussied up from an 1835 effort) now hangs in a place of honor in Boston’s Old State House, where it reminds us that a poor person can stake a political claim and then make something of it. In 1840, aged 98, ‘old Hewes’ died of injuries incurred while traveling to address an Independence Day celebration. ©

[Stanley]

"The universe was not made for your convenience." Edward Witten.

I am one of those who will say at the drop of a hat that mathematics belongs among the ‘liberal arts;’ indeed, historically, it’s a charter member. I worked long and hard to get math per se included in the Honors College curriculum, and yet when asked (usually by a mathematician) what an ‘honors’ seminar in, say, calculus might look like, I never could find an answer. I don’t suppose I even knew where to look. Luckily for generations of honors college students, actual mathematicians kept coming forward to answer that question, but my discomfort remains. Perhaps I should take heart, courage, even inspiration from the extraordinary life of Edward Witten, who still flourishes (in the Simonyi chair) at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and whose awards and prizes include the Fields Medal, the mathematics Nobel (1990). But Witten began as an historian! Edward Witten was born in Baltimore on August 26, 1951, and in 1968 went off to Brandeis to study history (major) and linguistics (minor). Math figured in none of his horizons, let alone his topologies or manifolds. He wanted to be a political journalist. While still in college he wrote (provocatively) for The Nation and New Republic, and in his graduation year he went off to join the George McGovern campaign before returning to grad school (Wisconsin) for PhD studies in Economics. So far he sounded like a lot of people I have known. But something happened at Madison to snap that string. He dropped out after only one semester and is next heard of at Princeton tunneling away for a PhD in mathematics but then shifting over to Physics. One guesses that Witten was hiding something under his bonnet. Indeed he was: a deep understanding of the higher maths and an astonishing ability to express physical realities through mathematical models and formulae. He left Princeton fleetingly to go to Harvard (where he won a MacArthur in 1982), but soon returned to Princeton to work (fruitfully) on such mysteries as spacetime, knots, strings, manifolds, and something called Minkowski Space. It’s beyond me, but I insist that it’s one of the liberal arts. Witten still ‘does’ politics, especially in the interests of peace in the Middle East, and he still plays tennis, and those things I can figure out. ©

[Stanley]

"When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago . . . she was 18 years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth." Theodore Dreiser, 1900.

My three (brilliant) lit professors (two in American, one in French) never succeeded in teaching me the differences between “realism” and “naturalism.” My adolescent enthusiasms for Mark Twain (at my dad’s urging I read Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”) left me thinking that both schools were concerned with telling it like it was, warts and all, no impossible feats, few if any unassailable virtues, and especially no deus ex machina. But Professor Hennig Cohen insisted that there was a difference. He used Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) as his test case for “naturalism.” Dreiser himself was born of immigrant stock (German father, Czech mother) on August 27, 1871, and spent what we might call a “realistic” youth in a large family dogged by low wages, grinding poverty, and frequent moves to find something better—only usually there was nothing better to find. Add to that his dad’s religious tyranny and his mom’s native tolerance, and we have a kid who—with right opportunities—might indeed have become a realist writer. But he added naturalism as a student (one year only) at Indiana University and then as a journeyman journalist in Pittsburgh, reporting on poor people’s lives while voraciously reading anything he could find by Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, respectively the defender and the traducer of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories. One could say that it all went together into Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie. They say that first novels are often nakedly autobiographical. If that’s so, then Carrie is a tale about what might have happened to Theodore if he’d been a girl. She was a good kid in rural America, dreaming of glamor and success. She goes to the city (three cities, actually) and finds that her success can’t be attained virtuously. Carrie is just an ordinary person, lucky and not, good and bad, whose sins don’t kill her. Her attainment of stardom leaves much wreckage in its wake, some of it her own. Sister Carrie figures for some as the best-ever urban novel in American literature. I guess one could say that naturalism is realism stripped of any moral lesson, its plots and its characters moved by environmental forces and tending towards no certain end. ©

[Tripps]

never succeeded in teaching me the differences between “realism” and “naturalism.”

I'm the same - I decided that you must be very very clever to know - and even cleverer to explain - the difference. My inner Lancastrian says there is no difference, but what do I know? .

Love seeing 'deus ex machina ' used. The classicist Boris could do with one of those at the moment.

[Stanley]

I thought exactly the same thing David when I read the piece. To me they are ways of describing the same thing, what can be more realistic than something that is natural? Either I am missing something or these higher thinkers are being too clever by half!

[Tripps]

Either I am missing something or these higher thinkers are being too clever by half!

I'm fond of quoting 'man has never lived with a level of technology lower than that available'. I think this may be the 'Arts' man's intellectual equivalent. No denying Uncle Bob is a clever man, and he works on a higher plane than the rest of us who sit at his feet on a daily basis.

That said - I owe it to my self esteem, and antecedents, to say occasionally - "that's nonsense".

[Stanley]

"I would be remembered as a teacher." George Hoyt Whipple, in his 'biographical memoir,' National Academy of Sciences.

My grandmother Bliss (1880-1946) was, I’ve learned from family stories, a remarkable person. After graduating college (1901) she hied off to South Carolina to teach for 5 years in a black school (she was a ‘radical Republican’—remember those?), and returned to Iowa for a 5-year courtship with a poor professor she came to call her “lover boy” (I still have their love letters). Ethel was, withal, “a woman of strongly held opinions” on a range of topics, for instance alcoholic drink (against), Teddy Roosevelt (for), W. C. Fields (against), and sports (all three of her sons became remarkable athletes). Diet was among her positive crusades, balanced diets with plenty of veggies (including tomatoes which immigrant women in her neighborhood thought poisonous). As for proteins, she was an advocate of organ meat, especially liver, and as with several of her crusades she based her advocacy on science, in this case the science of Dr. George Hoyt Whipple, born in New Hampshire on August 28, 1878, and by the time grandma read about his work the founding professor of pathology at the University of Rochester medical school. There, his research interests in liver pathology (honed to a sharp edge by bile studies at Yale and Johns Hopkins) took on new urgency when Whipple discovered the therapeutic potential of a liver diet. Having discovered it clinically, with experiments on anemic dogs, Whipple then went about studying it in the cause and effect terms of nutritional science. He began writing about it when grandma’s eldest boy was 9, and he would remember his liver diets all his life. “I didn’t know what a steak was,” he often told me over steak dinners, “until I left home.” He liked liver, too, luckily. Besides winning a disciple in Ethel McKinley Bliss, in Ames, Iowa, George Hoyt Whipple won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1934, and it was, of course, for his liver work. Whipple went on at Rochester for decades, retiring (as dean) in 1953, but he continued to dabble in research, wilderness canoeing, and salmon fishing. He also kept to his diet which was, perhaps, a good one. He died in 1976. ©

[Stanley]

"Without music, life would be a mistake." Nietzsche.

Elva Ruby Miller (1907-1997) was a Missourian who moved to California, studied music, and then in the 1960s became modestly and briefly famous (as “Mrs. Miller”) for singing badly. Although it hurt her feelings (she said) to be known as an off-tune amateur who could only rarely split the difference between flat and sharp, she made a reasonable living of it, for a time in the 1960s, including comedy appearances on national TV. Oddly enough, and at the same time, British pop culture produced its own “Mrs. Mills,” a working-class gal whose husband Bert maintained London’s double-decker buses and was herself a competent civil service typist. This Brit Mrs. Mills, one or two of whose songs actually made the pop charts, was born Gladys Jordan on August 29, 1918. Her mother (Minnie) wanted Gladys to rise in the world and set her to piano lessons when she (Gladys) was only 3. Little Gladys stood it for 9 years and learned quite a bit of piano, but as she approached her difficult teens she threw it all over, sick to death of being rapped over the knuckles (with her piano teacher’s knitting needles!!!) for adding “fiddly bits” to classical pieces. Piano playing led naturally to typing, charm and gregariousness led naturally to Bert and marriage, but she kept at the music, playing fiddly bits for churches and clubs and earning fiddly bits of pin money, when in 1960 she was “discovered” while playing at a country club “do” by Frankie Vaughan’s manager, Paul Cave, who liked her style and thought something might be made of it. “Mrs. Mills’ Medley” was her first pop chart hit (December 1961), and there would be others, and there were guest appearances on national TV, including the Morecambe & Wise show and a star turn on “This Is Your Life.” She and Bert gave up on typing and buses and moved to a nice place in the rural fastnesses of Buckinghamshire, even bought and ran a pub for a time (too successfully, they decided). And there was a world tour for the ordinary working woman known by her fans as “our Glad.” One thing I don’t know is whether, on its American leg, Mrs. Mills ever met (let alone sang a duet with) Mrs. Miller. Had she done so, you could have told the difference, if you had a good ear for music. Mrs. Mills sang in tune. ©

[Stanley]

"All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it is trivial. " Ernest Rutherford.

In 1963, in his highly entertaining year-end lecture (rapid fire questions about loud pops, frothing beakers, and technicolor explosions) my brilliant, young chemistry professor, Alan MacDiarmid, revealed his ambitious side, and noted that he’d grown up on a New Zealand sheep farm right next to the Rutherfords’ place. That may have been the first time I’d even heard of Ernest Rutherford, but it was certainly the first time I looked him up, to find that he was a brilliant scientist who merged careful experimentalism with bold theory to help build our modern picture of the atom, especially radioactive ones. Ernest Rutherford was born near Spring Green, New Zealand, on August 30, 1871. At Canterbury College in New Zealand he performed brilliantly, first in the arts, debate, and rugby, but it was his third degree, a BSc, that brought him a fellowship at Cambridge and an invitation (from J. J. Thompson) to work at the then fairly new Cavendish Laboratory. Thompson would go on to win a Nobel in Physics in 1906, Rutherford a Nobel in Chemistry in 1908. His more famous work actually came later, but that’s another story. The 1908 Nobel was for Rutherford’s “investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances”—neither of which I can tell you very much about, except that they are closely related. The work itself was done collaboratively, at the Cavendish but especially at McGill University in Montreal, where Rutherford’s acknowledged brilliancy and his teamwork lab methods drew in all sorts of people, established scientists and brilliant youngsters. He finished out his career, brilliantly, at Manchester University and then back at the Cavendish, in Cambridge. But as a Nobelist, Rutherford was claimed by both New Zealand and Canada, each with some justice. I am sticking with New Zealand. In 1963, Alan MacDiarmid told us, as it were confessing his ambition, that he very much hoped there was something in the water. There must have been. Alan MacDiarmid himself was awarded a Nobel Prize (in Chemistry) in 2000. ©.

[Stanley]

"We are women, American women, as intensely interested in all that pertains to us as to all other American women." Josephine Ruffin, 1895, speech, National Association of Colored Women.

In 1858, in Boston, George Lewis Ruffin (24) and Josephine St. Pierre (16), took their wedding vows. Together they raised five children (four sons and a daughter), all successful in life, while outside the home George and Josephine would blaze new trails, George as (for instance) Harvard Law’s first black graduate, Boston’s first black city councilor, and New England’s first black municipal judge. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was born in Boston on August 31, 1842. Her French Caribbean father (an eminent clothier) and English immigrant mother wanted the best for her and moved to New York where Josephine could attend an integrated school. They returned to Boston when that city’s schools integrated. Aged 16, Josephine married George (in a church founded by her father), and the couple set agitating for abolition, then recruiting black soldiers for the Union army and doing war work for the US Sanitary Commission. There Josephine ran into several leading women’s rights advocates, and together with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone founded (in 1869) the American Woman Suffrage Association and, socially, the New England Woman’s Club. On the side, so to speak, Josephine was a journalist, reporting for The Courant, a black weekly then published in Boston. She also raised money for the Exodusters, freed slaves wanting to settle on Kansas’s broad prairies. When George died (1886), she was not left bereft, and used some of her money to found, publish, and edit Woman’s Era, the first magazine for a black, female readership. Josephine Ruffin founded several social and political associations mainly for black women while working patiently for the racial integration of other national women’s organizations. This latter was unrewarding work in the Jim Crow era, which may be why, in 1910, she became co-founder and charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. All this while, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin had the satisfactions of working from her nice home in one of Boston’s more fashionable neighborhoods. And when she was finally buried (her kidneys got her in 1924) she was interred next to George in the region’s most fashionable resting place for the Brahmin class, Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Since 1999, her marble bust has stood in the State House: where it’s arrayed in integrated majesty with six other Massachusetts pioneers of women’s rights. ©

[Stanley]

"But mostly he watched with eager search// The belfry-tower of the old North Church." Longfellow, "Paul Revere's Ride."

Somewhat incongruously, if you know your New England history, the oldest surviving church building in Boston is Episcopalian, the Old North, the one from which (in April 1775) two lantern-lights sent Paul Revere and William Dawes out on their midnight rides. Most of the Old North congregation were loyalists, but not the sexton, Robert Newman, who climbed the belfry-tower to set the lanterns that started the war. Stealth being the name of the game, Newman could not have rung the church bells, but those bells survive, too; cast in 1744 and 1745, the Old North’s bells are the oldest ‘ring’ in the USA. And they were cast in Gloucester, England, by Rudhalls, itself a venerable firm, founded by old Abraham Rudhall, who was born in Gloucester on September 1, 1657. No one seems to know how he became a bell founder (“founder” is what we call a bell-maker), for he was a Quaker, the son of a Quaker carpenter, and first apprenticed in that trade. Quakers didn’t approve of church towers, far less bells, but old Abraham Rudhall not only became a master founder but developed a new technique for tuning his bells—by turning the bell on a lathe, more controllable and quicker than the traditional chipping away of bell-metal here and then there to get the right ‘tone.’ He was hugely successful; by 1705 he’d cast, tuned, and installed 547 rings, quite an output when you consider that the largest bell in a ring might weigh over a ton, and ‘ring’, applied to bells, is a collective noun, like ‘an exaltation of larks.’ By the time he died, in 1728, old Abraham’s bells hung all over, including a ring of 10 at the famous St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, London. The firm stayed in the family until it went bankrupt, in the 19th century. The Old North’s ring was founded by old Abraham’s grandson (and young Abraham’s son) Abel Rudhall. Today the Old North’s eight bells are much restored (even good old bells need restorations), but (inscribed by Abel Rudhall) they ring still today, thanks to the devoted labors of the Guild of Bellringers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: if you’re in Boston you can hear them every Sunday, at noon, right at the end of the 11:00 service. ©

[Stanley]

"Rex Goreleigh: Migrant Workers' Witness". Title of an art show put on in 2018 by the Princeton (NJ) Historical Society.

It has been the fate of quite a few artists that their paintings begin to sell well only after death stills their need for shelter, food, and pigments. That has certainly happened to the African-American painter Rex Goreleigh, whose works are now easier to follow (in gallery sales catalogs and in museum guides) than his still rather obscure life. But it would be a mistake to think that he lived (and painted) in grinding poverty. Rex Goreleigh was born on September 2, 1902, in Penillyn, Gwynedd township, a pleasantly rural place in the prosperous environs of Montgomery County, places which as their names suggest were thick with Welsh Quaker heritage. One guesses that his parents might have been in service, so he may have had to contend with poverty as well as race. Added to that he grew up with a debilitating stutter. Goreleigh took refuge in drawing, then painting, developing enough talent to think something might be made of it. So it was off to New York where he waited on tables and, somehow, gained the patronage of Diego Rivera, then muralizing the Rockefeller Center, and then the New Deal’s WPA, which took even black artists off the street and gave them useful projects to paint, food, shelter, and (in Goreleigh’s case) further instruction (from Ben Shahn). But from all this came a life that was not one of grinding poverty. Based first in Chicago, then North Carolina, and then for a very long time (1947 to 1986) in Princeton, NJ, Rex Goreleigh developed a style, a set of favorite subjects or themes, and painted and sold the results. What one often finds in his works—those that have found their way online—is people of color, but what shows in Goreleigh’s human subjects black and white is poverty, labor, strength, and simple pleasures. There is dancing in Trenton, but also there is the countryside around Princeton which was, and is, so like his childhood surroundings at Penillyn. Goreleigh also directed the Princeton Art Group, a successful cooperative. And he developed his very own atelier, his “Studio-On-The-Canal,” where, for well over 20 years, he taught young folks and older ones how to draw and how to paint. Perhaps he taught them also how to make a reasonable living while doing so. His is an interesting story that deserves more attention—and at least a Wikipedia entry!! ©

[Stanley]

"If you analyze the function of an object, its form becomes obvious." Ferdinand Porsche.

In the aftermath of WWI and the Versailles Treaty Ferdinand Porsche chose Czech citizenship, even though he was already a director in the Austrian firm Daimler. After all, he’d been born in northern Bohemia on September 3, 1875, and he was by 1919 a forward-thinking sort of engineer who upset his fellow board-members at Daimler by insisting that the firm should design and produce cars for a mass market. Made redundant, he formed his own company, and with the backing of the Jewish financier (and amateur race-driver), Alfred Rosenberger, was able to entice away from Daimler a good design and engineering team. So far, so good, but pretty soon Porsche’s dream of a ‘people’s car’ coincided ever so closely with Adolf Hitler’s plans; Rosenberger wisely jumped ship (to New York City), and in the same year that Hitler announced the ‘Volkswagen’ project, the Führer (or it may have been Goebbels) made Ferdinand Porsche into a German citizen. There is copious evidence that Porsche (and his son ‘Ferry’—short for Ferdinand, Jr.) relished both the attention and the investment, and besides undertaking many projects for the Third Reich (in peace and then war) both rose high in Nazi party ranks (Porsche senior became SS-Oberführer) and waxed higher in the eyes of Hitler and of Albert Speer his master-of-munitions. Come actual war, or a little before, Porsche’s factories were turning out Tiger tanks and other such vehicles of destruction, some of them using the VW’s air-cooled engine—which Porsche may, ironically, have pirated from a Czech firm. The legal dispute over that problem was settled by Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. Relations between Porsche and the Führer were close enough that, after the second peace, the French insisted on throwing him in jail. But he didn’t stay long, and he died (in 1951) a free man at the head of his own company, already becoming a hallmark for marketable sports cars. The Volkswagen has lived on too, usually under its own marque, and my dad (who’d seen a very bad slice of the European war) found himself a reluctant owner of VWs from 1963 to 1980 (a beetle convertible and two beetle sedans)—when he gave them up for Japanese people’s cars, reflecting that history is, indeed, full of ironies. ©

[Stanley]

"Make no little plans." Daniel Burnham.

Daniel Hudson Burnham was born into comfort (on September 4, 1846) and as his father’s business prospered he grew up into wealth. And his inheritance included ambition. His parents were Swedenborgians, a transcendental offshoot of Protestantism, and they instilled in him the notion that life’s mission was to do well for oneself and to do good for others. However, the idea that such goals might involve hard work seems to have evaded Burnham in his youth, perhaps not misspent but devoted to the enjoyable (for him, athletics and art), rather than to what the world thought necessary. Despite his wealth and polish and despite being subjected to private tutors for several years, he failed to qualify for university admission (at Harvard and Yale). After a couple of years’ wandering, though, he found his place. His art hobby landed him a draftsman’s apprenticeship to a leading Chicago architect, and in 1867 he announced to his parents that he was on course to become “the greatest architect in the world.” It seems unlikely that they believed him, and in truth he didn’t quite make it. His was an era of great architects, and he was only very, very good at it—including some startling advances in building techniques like the ‘floating foundation.’ Some excellent Burnham buildings still survive, and his genius is remembered too the evanescent (papier-mâché) wonder of the “White City” of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition (1893). But it was then, in leading the commission that oversaw the World Fair’s design and construction, that Burnham found his true greatness as a planner, and he became America’s leading advocate and entrepreneur of the city beautiful, the city efficient, the city pleasant. He planned everywhere (Cleveland, San Francisco, Manila). His plan for the lower end of the National Mall in Washington is the most obvious survival (although his original idea for the Jefferson Memorial as an American Panthéon may be seen as a vestige of Swedenborgian thought). But he’s most famous for his 1909 “Plan of Chicago.” That great document, devised for Chicago and its environment, came at about the same time that Harvard and Yale apologized for their admissions oversights by giving Burnham honorary degrees. These late life honors went some way towards fulfilling that apprentice’s boast he had made in 1867, as a tender youth, age 21. ©

[Stanley]

"Maturity is reached the day we don't need to be lied to about anything." Frank Yerby.

Coincidences sometimes matter, as we see in this story about an Arkansas judge, a genius teacher, and the novels of Frank Garvin Yerby, born in Georgia on September 5, 1916 of mixed (Seminole-African and Scottish) parentage. Yerby wrote 34 novels, at least one of which was long on my parents’ bookshelves (where it rested unread by me). He was latterly criticized for romanticizing his African-American characters (and also, since his historical fiction ranged widely for not writing enough about African-Americans). So be it, as they say. But in the late 1950s, Carolyn Blakely, a teacher in a still-segregated Arkansas high school, thought that romanticized black characters might be a tonic for her difficult, impertinent, trouble-making student, Olly Neal, whom she thought very clever and very much headed for trouble. She found a way to funnel Yerby novels to Olly (although first she had to find Yerby novels for Olly to steal, for Yerby wasn’t a big name in rural Arkansas), and Olly stole (and read) them. Carolyn Blakely went on to get her doctorate from Oklahoma State (in English, the first African-American to make that grade at OSU). Dr. Blakely then went on to become long-time dean of the honors college at her undergraduate alma mater, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. She continued to be a genius teacher there, expert at challenge and at lift, and the Pine Bluff honors college now bears her name. Olly Neal, that trouble-making juvenile delinquent, went on to make a lot more trouble (‘good trouble,’ in the manner of John Lewis) as a Freedom Rider, then served in Viet Nam. After law school and several terms as a district attorney, Neal became a district judge and then the first black person to serve as a justice of the Arkansas Court of Appeals (1996-2007). Carolyn Blakeley and Olly Neal have been inducted into the Arkansas Hall of Fame. Frank Yerby went on to write a lot more novels, one of which became an inspiration for Game of Thrones. Assuredly this real-life saga doesn’t turn exclusively or entirely on the romantic historical novels of Frank Yerby, but they had something to do with it, and it’s a good story anyway. And just as I’ve never read a Yerby novel, I’ve seen no episodes of Game of Thrones. Perhaps I should. ©

[Stanley]

From Bob this morning...
My oldest, dearest, and closest reader has discovered a big mistake in this morning’s note, the comment that one of Frank Yerby’s novels was an inspiration for the serial “Crown of Thorns.” I did say I’ve never watched that serial, which I haven’t, but anyway I got its title wrong. It’s the serial “Game of Thrones” that arose, somehow, out of a reading of one of Yerby’s novels. That might qualify as a cosmic error, or a comic one, and of course i apologize for it. My only defense is that I have indeed never watched it, whatever it is called.
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

"The Lord is my rock and my salvation." Inscription chosen for Peter Allan's gravestone, 1849. Whitburn Churchyard, then in County Durham.

For several of my grade-school years my favorite reads were Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. Goodness knows which (of many) editions: mine were already hoary with age and dog-eared with use, having been my grandpa’s when he was a boy (in the late 1880s). The first English translation of Family Robinson was published in 1816 by William Godwin (1756-1838), which now intrigues me. Why was the radical Godwin interested in a tale so woven through with conservative “family values”? Perhaps it was because radicals, too, have “family values?” I never acted on my schoolboy idolatry of these imaginary pioneers, but the idea of building a hermit’s life yet with many modern comforts was wildly attractive. One who might just have read the Godwin translation—and then acted on it—was Peter Allan, born in a small village near Edinburgh on September 6, 1799. His early life is interesting only because his later life is fascinating, and that began in 1828 when he moved his wife Elizabeth, their small children, and his parents as far away from civilization as he could get, and proceeded to build a ‘hermitage’ with many modern comforts. But no tropical island for the Anglo-Scottish family Allan. Instead they moved to a quarry on the Durham coast, all cliffs and rocks looking out to the North Sea, where they hollowed out a series of 15 interconnected caves and called it home. How they made a living out there interested the customs officers, for he was suspected of running a smuggling operation, but unlike Crusoe and the Robinsons they did interact with locals, selling some produce (including hares and rabbits that might have been poached) and opening a country tavern they called, appropriately, The Grotto (which interested the excise officers). Allan never bought the land, so besides the troubles with taxmen there were some with the landowner. But the Allans also saved some ships in distress (the coast there was a ships’ graveyard in the era of sail) and lived in at least rude comfort. Peter Allan died in 1849, after 21 years of living not the life of Riley but of the Robinsons. It was a life comfortable enough that his family (including his parents, who survived him) stayed on for some years in their wild yet civilized cave house. Much later, a rock fall obliterated most of their work, but the Grotto has survived and is now a gastropub of some repute. ©

[Stanley]

"The Group was, professionally, the best thing that ever happened to me." Elia Kazan, 1974.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) pricks consciences painfully but its final message (one conquers the terrors of death by living each day to its fullest) has made it a staple of high school drama: “feel-better” if not “feel-good.” Wilder’s next Pulitzer was The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). It has a similar message and uses similar meta-play devices, but it’s less often reproduced, perhaps because it is less reassuring. Its rarity in repertory may also owe to more than a hint of plagiarism (Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake translated to a New Jersey suburb). Whichever: in its first season it found its perfect director in an immigrant Greek named Elia Kazan. Born in Constantinople on September 7, 1909, Elia and his family came to America in 1913. They’d sailed on an uncle’s advice that American streets were paved with gold, but they found instead death (of his father), poverty, and a disturbing lack of Greek Orthodox priests in the New York suburb where they settled. Even so, Kazan proved a fine student at Williams College, where he took all sorts of jobs to pay his fees and became known as “gadget” (because he was “handy to have around”). He also picked up an interest in acting, but shed it for directing when, in depth-of-depression New York, his work with “The Group” (in experimental theatre) showed him deficient on stage. Kazan hit the directorial big-time with The Skin of Our Teeth (he and his lead actress, Tallulah Bankhead, carrying off several awards) and then repeating (with Bankhead) with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1947, not a reassuring play). Kazan was a genius stage director, but his Hollywood work made him an immortal, including Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and, above all else, On the Waterfront (1954) where he resumed a brilliant partnership with Marlon Brando and kick-started the career of Eva Marie Saint. But about the same time (1952), his turncoat testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee torpedoed the careers of many he’d first met in The Group, and who’d helped him, in 1930s New York. Kazan later put that down to personal resentments and ideological estrangement. Whichever: his testimony cost him friends and respect, but Kazan went on for decades, and with some successes. In 1998 a “Lifetime Achievement” from the Academy marked, in a way, the burying of that particular hatchet. ©

[Stanley]

"Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening." Coco Chanel.

Higher education students often propose a course of study in “X” when there is no (or too little) “X” on the curriculum. It’s usually passed off as a bee in the bonnet, smelling more of passion than of good sense, but at Lancaster University it was institutionalized as a “School of Independent Studies,” and it flourished there for over two decades, its undergraduate majors often producing superb work in their ‘invented’ fields. Even this approach is expensive, but the potential value of such institutional flexibility can be seen (for instance) in the career of Muriel Pemberton, who was supposed to be a painter. She was born on September 8, 1910, in the middle of the Staffordshire potteries, where (of course) her artistic talents were thought perfect for glazing flowers onto ceramics. But Muriel wanted to be a “proper artist” and, at 18, she kicked over pot-painting to win a scholarship—as a painter on canvas—at the Royal College of Art in London. She did very well there, painting, but for various reasons (e.g. stretching a tight budget by designing her own clothes), she became more deeply interested in fashion, from current haute couture to how and why people dressed as they did in, say, Elizabethan or Georgian times. No such study being available at the RCA, she proposed to do it herself, and luckily made this proposal to a medievalist historian of art, Ernest Tristram, who saw enough good sense in her passion to challenge her. If she could make a case and invent a coherent curriculum, she could do it. So she did it, and her curriculum (stretching from the mechanics of cloth-cutting through a year’s apprenticeship to a leading couturier) made Muriel Pemberton, in 1931, the first-ever RCA graduate to earn (or invent?) a diploma in fashion. She made a successful career out of it, making designs, teaching design (to some very famous designers), and building up a design history curriculum. Then, in partial retirement from fashion design after 1975, she returned to painting, and through her gallery exhibitions made a lot of people wonder why in heaven’s name she’d thrown over all that high art talent for the sake of mere fashion. It’s almost certain that Professor Tristram asked her that same question in 1929, and even more likely that she had through her life fashioned an answer. ©