BOB'S BITS

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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Why many elevators don't stop at the 13th floor.
Otis and His Elevator.
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When you reach the top, you should remember to send the 'ascenseur' back down for the others. Edith Piaf.

In some rags to riches stories, it’s the rags that stick in the memory, and that was the case with Elisha Graves Otis, whose path to the upper floors was littered with failure and heartbreak and who, when he finally reached the top floor, didn’t live long enough to enjoy the view. But it all started happily enough, on a Vermont farm, on August 3, 1811. He was a skillful boy who enjoyed tinkering, and moved away from home in 1831 to earn enough money to marry, set up a gristmill, which failed, and then a sawmill, which also failed. Then his wife died, leaving him with two toddlers, and he became a piece-worker in Troy, NY, making dolls. There he invented a new process, which quadrupled doll output, and used his bonus (a princely $500) to set up as an inventor. Two promising inventions later, the city of Albany cut off his water supply and the business failed. We next find him managing a bedstead factory, puzzling how he could safely move heavy stuff to an upper floor. In 1851 he installed a safety brake on the lift. He had done something similar before and neither patented the device nor requested a bonus, but three years later P. T. Barnum, seeking to cash in on the vogue for Crystal Palace exhibitions, announced a World’s Fair, and our Otis thought he might usefully demonstrate his “safety elevator.” He did so, quite spectacularly (“death defying”, Barnum would have called it), and the orders for Otis elevators flooded in, first (1858) for the 5-story Haughwout Department Store in New York City. Elisha Otis almost immediately died of diphtheria, aged 50, leaving his surviving son and company to profit from his perseverance (and from his wondrous, death-defying Otis elevator).
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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I am proud to be an American Citizen.
Robert Purvis, 1810-1898
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It is the safeguard of the strongest that he lives under a government that is obliged to respect the voice of the weakest. Robert Purvis.

Today the Fair Hill Cemetery occupies a block in North Philadelphia, sited between Amtrak’s main line and Temple University. Originally a Quaker burial ground, its headstones are of the same size and color, their serried ranks interrupted, here and there, by ancient yews but by no great family’s monument. The graveyard came into its own in 1843 and most graves date from before 1900. Among those who rest there in the equality of death are several founders of Swarthmore College, including Deborah Wharton. You will also find the graves of Lucretia Mott and other leaders of the 19th-century women’s suffrage movement. Several notable people of color who were or became Quakers are here, including Robert Purvis and his wife Harriet, both of whom could have “passed” as white but who chose instead to identify with the black community. Harriet was the daughter and heiress of James Forten, a slave who became Philadelphia’s leading shipbuilder. Robert Purvis was the son of a wealthy South Carolina planter (white) and his wife, also Harriet, a woman of color descended from a prominent planter family. They could not marry because of South Carolina’s race laws, and so chose to live together in sinful defiance. Later, the Purvises migrated northwards, to Philadelphia and its Quaker community, where Robert Purvis (born in Charleston on August 4, 1810) and his three brothers grew up and received the best education that the family could buy (in Robert’s case, at Amherst). Robert Purvis returned to Philadelphia to marry Harriet Forten, and both of them would use their considerable inheritances to fight for equality for all African Americans, first as leading abolitionists (station masters for the Underground Railway), then as supporters of radical Reconstruction, and finally as active and influential social reformers in an industrializing Philadelphia. In 1898, Robert Purvis was buried at Fair Hill. In the 20th century, the Philadelphia Quaker community moved west to the leafier suburbs, and in 1983 sold the burial ground. In the next decade the cemetery fell into disuse and was repurchased by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Since then, it has become the focus of various Quaker reforms, the site of self-help and education projects, a place for neighborhood garden projects (flowers for beauty and foods for health), and a good place to visit on your next trip to Philadelphia. The Fair Hill Burial Ground: now on the National Register, a place where all were buried as equals and which continues to embody that ideal for the living. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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“Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” Luke 24: 29
Abbé Pierre and the Planet of the Poor.
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Henri Marie Joseph Grouès was born in Lyon, France, on August 5, 1912. In his long life (94 years) he would take on several new names, the first one (Brother Philippe) consequent on his 1931 ordination as a Capuchin monk. Even then he made his mark by making his ordination the occasion for renouncing his considerable inheritances. His next names were taken on to ensure his anonymity as a leader of the Résistance, mainly in the French alps and helping Jews and other refugees to find safety in Switzerland. After the war he became known as “Abbé Pierre,” the spiritual leader of the charitable “Emmaus” movement which called on all comfortable people, but especially the wealthy, to give shelter, warmth, amité, and food to the comfortless and the friendless. Abbé Pierre took his inspiration from several sources, notably the story in Luke (24:8-35) wherein two of Jesus’s followers meet a wanderer on the road to Emmaus. Disheartened by the crucifixion and puzzled by stories of the empty tomb, they fail to recognize him but they do not fail to give him shelter and food. When he breaks bread with them, they recognize him as Jesus, the resurrected Christ. Thus also Abbé Pierre accepted the advice of the Jesuit who ordained him, to ‘become as anti-clerical as the saints.’ As clear as his Emmaus mission was, Abbé Pierre’s politics were ambiguous, even possibly irrelevant to his behavior in both secular and spiritual realms. He never renounced his ordination, but his views (notably on sex and sexuality in the priesthood) put him constantly at odds with the church, a relationship made more difficult by his lifelong association with Mlle. Lucie Coutaz, his partner in the Résistance and his secretary in Emmaus. His wartime record in protecting French Jews sat oddly with his post-war defense of Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, and his relationships with Israel were further troubled by the support he expressed for Palestinians. It’s also worthy of note that his Gaullist sympathies evaporated after the war when he announced his ‘conversion’ to socialism. In short, Abbé Pierre appears to have been a law unto himself, an exile from the nation of the rich, a citizen of “La Planète des Pauvres”. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"The only thing I learned in acting school was how to be scared."
Learning how not to be scared with Lucille Ball
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How was “I Love Lucy ” born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we’d profit from them. Lucille Ball

One difficulty in dating the beginning of Lucille Ball’s career in TV and films is that so much of it can be seen as apprenticeship: in modeling, in vaudeville, and quite a long run (virtually the whole of the 1940s decade) as “Queen of the Bees”, playing second or third leads in undistinguished and now indistinguishable ‘B’ movies. Along the way, her rather anonymous chestnut hair went from blonde to a fiery red, which is where it stayed because, red-headed, she became her very own star on TV, in the long-running sitcom “I Love Lucy.” Even that was a kind of apprenticeship, for her longest and. most successful lead role as the first woman to head up a major Hollywood production studio, and the innovations and scrapes she learned in “I Love Lucy” were key elements in her success on the business end of the entertainment game. Any one or all of those things would have seemed a very unlikely outcome for a female of her background. Lucille Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, NY, the daughter of a telephone lineman. Henry (“Had”) Ball and his wife, Desirée. Her dad’s death and her mother’s remarriage left her with her maternal grandparents, socialists of a puritanical bent who didn’t allow even mirrors in the house, a mirror (of course) being both sign and soul of vanity. And there wasn’t much else, either, especially after her grandparents lost an expensive civil suit and the Great Depression hit. In 1929, perhaps because she had to, Lucille escaped to New York City and a stint as a model. Such success as she had made her hanker after acting, and after not doing very well in acting school she went west, to Hollywood, to another set of apprenticeships, including her marriage to Desi Arnaz, a much younger, and rather dashing, Cuban-American bandleader. It was that marriage and some of its problems that provided the solid base for the froth that was “I Love Lucy,” which ran for ten years and then set her up in production, where she shed Desi and bought him out of “Desilu Productions,” and it was at this role, CEO of Desilu Productions, that Lucille Ball really excelled. She worked at this one until she died, prospering as a producer and much loved as an iconic Hollywood ‘senior.’ ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Flapper girls, late nights, and family values
Kate Meyrick and Family Values/
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She was a lady, of good appearance and charming manners, and conducted her various clubs with more decorum than many, but with also a fine contempt for the law. London (Bow Street) Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, recalling his sentencing of Kate Meyrick.

In the UK as in the USA, those opposed to the extension of the suffrage to women often (and somewhat ironically) argued that enfranchising women to vote (or to have certain other ‘public’ rights) would erode female morality and disturb the temple quiet of family life. As if to prove them right, Kate Meyrick—born of respectable London parents on August 7, 1875, and then housewife and mother of 7 children—celebrated female enfranchisement not by voting (although she may indeed have voted) but by divorcing her husband and then, in the 1920s, becoming London’s most infamous nightclub owner, first as partner and then, from 1921, on her own. Her most famous club was “43”, at 43 Goddard Street (once the home of John Dryden), but as arrest, fines, and imprisonments succeeded previous arrests, fines, and imprisonments, Kate did her night clubbing under other names, for instance the Silver Slipper, the Cecil, Procters, the Folies Bergères, and then the “New” Folies. Kate appeared to be incorrigible, and was treated as such (or lionized, depending on their politics) by London newspapers, and became the immoral focus of a brave band of ‘restorationist’ reformers in the Tory party, including Home Secretary (and moral purity advocate) Sir William Joynson-Hicks and a veritable parade of purity-minded magistrates. That Mrs. Meyrick may have had other aims in mind, for instance marrying two of her daughters off to young aristocrats (and night-lifers) the 26th Baron Clifford and the 14th Earl of Kinnoul). Kate also made a lot of money, although most of it seems to have been spent on fines and new night clubs. She also won the praise in print and/or the night-time patronage of established and aspiring authors, for instance Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh. I also find echoes of her, or her clubs, in the comic novels and stories of P. G. Wodehouse, wherein Bertie Wooster and a succession of Mr. Mulliner’s nephews get involved, willy or nilly, with flapper-type girls of a certain class who enjoy dancing their nights away at strangely-named hot spots, though never “43” or the “Silver Slipper.” Mrs. Meyrick, poor lass, took very ill from her final imprisonments in 1930 and 1931, sewing mailbags (would you believe it?). She died, lamented by some, of exhaustion and the influenza, in early 1933. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Birds of a feather stick together
** Florence Augusta and her birds.
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We’ll take the girls afield, and let them get acquainted with the birds. Then of inborn necessity, they will wear feathers never more. Florence Merriam, circa 1899.

Before Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey came along ‘bird-watching’ was really bird collecting, and to collect birds you had first to kill them, skin them (carefully, preserving feathers and colors as best you could), and then hang them somewhere to enjoy birds in almost all their glory—except, of course, their songs, their calls, their social and nesting habits, and anything else connected with their being alive. So if you want to think of John James Audubon as a pioneer birder, go ahead, but add the footnote that he was also a bird-killer. Enter Florence Merriam, born on August 8, 1863, in upstate New York, into a wealthy family already in love with nature—and with acres of meadow and forest to prove it. Her father was a friend and correspondent of John Muir, later of Yosemite fame, and her brothers and sister fell in as junior naturalists. At some point, Florence went off killing, possibly when her brother (searching for small woodland mammals) accidentally executed Florence’s cat, more likely by the growing vogue for feathers in female fashion (mostly hats), a vogue that led to some extinctions and near-extinctions. At any rate, Florence was a confirmed bird watcher before she arrived at Smith College, where she urged her classmates to use their opera glasses in the field, not in the concert hall, and enjoy birds alive, study them in situ, get to know their habits of life. It caught on at Smith, and for the rest of her life (she lived to 85) Florence Merriam worked hard to make it catch on everywhere. And of course she married a naturalist, Vernon Bailey. They went a-birding together, at least until they were 78 and often in pretty rough country (for the dry air of desert places was thought to be curative for Florence’s tuberculosis). Florence Bailey’s rewards were, first, to be recognized as America’s pioneer birdwatcher, to see legislation passed (in 1900 and 1918) which protected endangered birds (and their feathers and eggs) from bird collectors and fashion hounds. In this she was aided by her husband, Vernon, and her brother, Clinton (the one who had killed her cat, all those years ago) who became director of the US Fish & Wildlife Service. Florence also wrote a ton of books and papers about birds here and there, and ranks today as the mother of American birders, the inventor of birdwatching for the masses, a pastime that had previously been the domain of poets. ©.
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I have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing.
Isaac Walton, 1593-1683
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Ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities and, when justified, the chiefest of all follies. Izaak Walton.

At about the same time that Will Shakespeare left London to return Stratford (where he was born and married, and would be buried), and to his wife Ann Hathaway and her “second-best bed,” another young provincial was moving from his birthplace to the great city to make a mark for himself, and that mark would be as a writer—but about fish and fishing, not about Malvolio and Macbeth. He was Isaak Walton, angler, born in Stafford—not Stratford. We don’t know his birthday, exactly, but it was in 1593, and since he proved his will on August 9, 1683, we’ll say August 9, 1593. He may have gone to town to be an apprentice ironmonger, or perhaps a draper, and he may have become a master draper, but the Civil Wars intervened and Izaak got sidetracked into royalist politics and even, at about the time that King Charles I was beheaded, as the keeper of one of the crown jewels, to be kept safe from Cromwellian usurpers. So Izaak was a royalist somebody, but in 1649 being a nobody seemed safer, so
he retired back to Stafford, took up residence on a small plot of land with river frontage, and devoted himself to a quiet, contemplative life, the life of a fisherman. He wrote about it, too, in what may be the most famous and least read book in the English canon, The Compleat Angler (1653), with many, many revisions and new editions, many by Walton himself before he died (in 1683) and more, on and on, right up to today. I’ve read an early edition myself, for Izaak’s politics rather than for his views on salmo trutta (he also had much to say on coarser fishes and coarser fishing), but what gives the book its enduring charm and made Walton the patron saint of many well-read fisherfolk were the many moral lessons he drew from the pursuit and capture of ‘the fish.’ Mainly, Isaak argued that fishing made one a better person: more patient, more philosophical, and wiser than most. And, I must add, Walton thought that fishing made you into one whose stories could always be believed, including those about the one that got away. As for that crown jewel, a diamond by the way, it didn’t get away. At some risk to himself, Izaak took it to the continent to turn it over to its rightful owner, who would—in 1660, become King Charles II. ©.
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A voice from the south.
Anna Julia Cooper, Freedom Fighter.
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Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’ Anna Haywood Cooper.

Anna Julia Cooper, née Haywood, was born a slave on August 10, 1858, and would spend her long life (she died in 1964) causing ‘good trouble’ in a quest for equality, for African-Americans in general but more especially for African-American women. As a North Carolina slave, she was freed by the Emancipation proclamation (the state still being in rebellion in 1862-63) but when equality became a legal reality she began her quest by seeking education in nearby Raleigh, in a school set up especially for the education of former slaves. There she prospered, well enough to gain admission to Oberlin College in Ohio. In both places her aptitude for mathematics caused problems, not because she was black but because she was female, and females were not supposed to be educable in that and allied male disciplines. In Raleigh she solved that problem by teaching math to fellow students, one of whom she married) and at Oberlin where she went after her husband’s death she simply insisted on studying the men’s curriculum. There she won both BA and MA, becoming one of the first two African-American women to achieve the Masters degree (the other was her Oberlin classmate Mary Church Terrell, another trouble-maker). Her first paying job was at the M Street School, a segregated institution in Washington DC. Eventually, Anna Cooper went on to earn a further degree (in history and sociology) from the Sorbonne, in the 1920s, and a PhD from Columbia in the 1950s, but it was at M Street that she made her mark, not only as headmistress (itself something of a revolution) but more so as the author of A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892). She became widely known (in the USA and abroad) as a black feminist, and participated in international conferences (in 1893, 1900, and 1919) on black and female rights. In her ‘retirement’ Cooper was appointed president of Frelinghuysen University (1930). There can be no doubt of her commitment to feminism, but no doubt either that throughout her life she felt the sting of racism. It began early, for like many born in slavery Anna Hayward Cooper never knew who her biological father was. Her mother would only say it was one of two Haywood brothers, both of them sons of the planter who owned Anna Hayward, and owned her mother. ©
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Early in 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
Alex Haley, 1921-1992.
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When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth. We all have it; it's a great equalizer. Alex Haley.

Genealogy is a tricky business, as Alex Haley discovered when he published Roots (1976) a family saga that stretched back through enslavement to the life of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped by slavers from a West African village circa 1767. Haley was already an accomplished writer, and his book became a best-seller that spawned a popular TV series. But doubters descended on the book, questioning its authenticity and its originality. How could a family’s history be traced through generations of slavery and then the terrifying anonymity of the Middle Passage? Haley has since admitted, or conceded in court, that some parts of Roots were imagined, some plagiarized, and (so far) none of Haley’s writings have made it into the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. But Haley’s writing career began in a hard-scrabble way. Alex Haley was born into a proud, accomplished black family, his father a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M, and a sometime visiting scholar at Cornell, in Ithaca, NY, where Alex was born on August 11, 1921. Young Alex was made very conscious of his mixed roots, in African, native American, and Scots-Irish cultures, and it’s possible that some of these stories were improved upon in the telling. In genealogy that’s nothing new. The prevailing myth in the traditional English aristocracy is that their progenitors were somehow linked to the royal family; hence the reigning monarch could (and did, in the 17^th century) address them all as “cousin” a catch-all term and appropriately vague. And then, about 50 years ago, a prosperous “distaff” branch of my family paid a clever Edinburgh genealogist to discover that they were ‘actually’ descended from Robert the Bruce, an heroic 13th-century King of the Scots, just as an earlier writer, a Bliss oddly enough, had claimed that a Bliss ancestor had fought at Agincourt, and so bravely that Henry V conferred on him the surname “Bliss” and a coat of arms to boot. It all seems very doubtful, and Haley had as much right as any Bliss to find his family’s way back to imagined origins. Haley himself had put together a successful writing career, beginning as a petty officer in WWII (the highest rank then achievable by a black man in the US Navy) and continuing through an excellent series of interviews that ran in Playboy in the 1960s, including ones with Miles Davis and Malcolm X. We are, most of us, a nation of immigrants, and mostly we didn’t come here as royal cousins or lost dauphins. Our origins are humble enough to make our vogue for genealogy one of the oddest artifacts of our history. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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From ground coffee to ground cocoa.
John Cadbury, 1801-1889.
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All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt. Charles M. Schulz.

Next time you enjoy a Cadbury’s chocolate (say a hazelnut bar or a chocolate orange, my favorites), you might reflect that it could have been tea or coffee, because it was as a tea merchant and coffee roaster that John Cadbury began his business career, in 1824. But soon he was also roasting cocoa beans, processing and selling them mainly as “nibs” (partially ground cocoa beans). And, being a good Quaker entrepreneur, he saw great potential in his nibs, steeped in hot water as a bitter drink or, better yet, ground to powder and mixed with sugar, and in 1831 he began business in earnest as a provider of relief for those whose sweet tooth gave them no rest. He would, I think, have been horrified to think that his product was addictive, for John Cadbury was born a fourth-generation Quaker, in Birmingham, England, on August 12, 1801, and among his several life-long pursuits was the prohibition of alcohol, the demon drink which, he thought, poisoned English social life and added to the ranks of its “vicious” poor. Just to drive the point home, he was appointed Birmingham’s overseer and guardian of the poor and served in that position from 1830 to 1841, roughly coterminous with the first ten years of his business career as a chocolate manufacturer. His business boomed for a while, but in the 1850s his second wife, Candia, died of tuberculosis and John himself was struck down by rheumatic fever. He lived out the rest of his life as an invalid, in comfortable circumstances, but his business declined. In 1861 he gave it over to his (and Candia’s) sons Richard and George. It was George Cadbury (1839-1922) who would give the firm its distinctively Quaker flavor, supporter of a multitude of good causes, the site of interesting experiments in labor relations, and in particular the center of a model industrial village—Bournville, now a part of Birmingham—where, as late as 2015, it was still impossible to buy an alcoholic beverage, although acquiring a Cadbury’s chocolate orange is a piece of cake. ©.

[I think Bob has slipped up here. The chocolate orange is a Terry's confection.]
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"She had something imperial in the pose of the head, and all her movements possessed an exquisite natural charm." Senator Carl Shurz on Kate Chase.
Kate Chase (Sprague), 1840-1899.
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Mrs. Lincoln was piqued . . . One of Kate Chase’s early explanations of the distance between herself and Mary Todd Lincoln.

In 19th-century America, the exclusion of women from politics led to quite a bit of unwomanly behavior by females whose personal qualifications for office and influence were often at least equal to those of their husbands, fathers, and/or brothers. Inevitably, many of these women were then and have been since characterized as plotters, devious sorts who used their femininities not as ornaments but as instrumentalities in their quests for power. Among these ‘Jezebels,’ my favorite is Jessie Benton Frémont, but surely the most famed was Katherine Jane (“Kate”) Chase, born near Cincinnati on August 13, 1840 to Ohio politician Salmon Chase and his second wife, Eliza Smith. Kate was expensively educated in New York, possibly to get her out from under her step-mother (Salmon Chase was three times a widower), but it enabled her to arrive in the nation’s capital a polished, beautiful, and intelligent woman of 21. Chase himself came in as Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary, one of the ‘team of
rivals’ who shared in common a desire to supplant their master. Kate Chase fell in with that idea with enthusiasm and skill, finding in honest Abe and his dowdy wife perfect foils for her father’s and her own ambitions. It’s possible, I think, that Mary Todd Lincoln’s unfortunate buying habits (in clothes, furnishings, and knick-knacks) came partly in response to Kate’s success in making herself and her father’s suburban mansion more stylish (and perhaps more popular) venues than the Lincoln White House. Those were but frothy triumphs (if indeed they were victories). Lincoln stayed in the White House, at the head of his team of rivals, and saw through the Civil War to victory. Salmon Chase’s own career, post-Appomattox, suggests that he may have been even more nakedly ambitious than his daughter. As for Kate, her 1863 marriage to Senator William Sprague turned out even less well, both of them using their philandries as weapons of war (Kate’s with the flamboyantly crooked Senator
Roscoe Conkling), and the marriage ended in 1882. By then her father was a decade dead, her share of the Sprague fortune dissipated, and women still had neither the vote nor a legitimate “public” identity. She lived out her life in relative poverty and obscurity, died in 1899, and was buried next her father. ©.
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The Woman behind the Man
Alma Hitchcock, film-maker
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I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, encouragement and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter, Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville. Alfred Hitchcock, 1979, speech at the American Film Institute.

Who knew that Alfred Hitchcock had a wife? Apparently plenty of people did, but I wasn’t among their number. The people who knew were in the know, ‘film people’ (workers in the industry, buffs from outside, scholars and critics), and there were times that they paid tribute to Hitch’s better half, for instance at the Hitchcock wedding, 1926, in London and at Brompton Oratory, at the hands of the cardinal-archbishop pro tem, Francis Bourne. The Hitchcock marriage and ménage got a lot of newsprint, too, in the couple’s old ages, around their 50th anniversary (1976, of course) and at their deaths, hers in 1982 and his just two years before. No one was around, however, to comment at the time on their odd birth coincidence, he being born on August 13, 1899, and she (Alma Lucy Reville) only a few hours after, but on August 14th. Hitchcock himself was a grocer’s son, born above the shop in an east London suburb. Alma Lucy Reville was also of humble origins, but her dad soon landed a job at the new Twickenham Film Studios, in London, and soon she was tea girl there, a tiny one (in her life she never made five feet) but with ambition, and by the time they met, under the customary ton of bricks, she was a film editor, and had acted. She probably knew more about the business than Hitchcock did. Once married Lucy retired but only into the near background, wife and mother (there was one child, Patricia) but only occasionally a credited collaborator, even in a couple of cases assistant director. Much more often, indeed commonly, she worked behind the scenes, or rather before them, readying film scripts (or even just film ideas) for the master of mystery. Before and after the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood, Alma Lucy worked for other directors, too, but from the late 40s she was Alfred Hitchcock’s coworker and no one else’s and generally, so to speak, in the writing department. Many archive photos show her in that role. Among the films where she might or should
have been credited were Hitchcock’s most famous, his masterpieces. She did share in his fame, and at his knighthood she became Alma, Lady Hitchcock, but there’s little doubt that she meant to stay in the background, just as (in 1926, at the demand of Alfred’s grandma) she converted to Roman Catholicism. At her death, obituarists rushed to confirm that they knew she was indeed the woman behind the man, and her (difficult) role has since been played, on film and excellently, by Helen Mirren and Imelda Staunton. One hopes that Alfred Hitchcock was always aware of it. ©
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“Ladylike is the beastliest word there is, If a girl isn't a lady . . . she'd better let it alone and be a free and happy bounder.”
E. Nesbit and her books.
------------------------------------------------------------
Also she had the power of silent sympathy. That sounds rather dull, I know, but it's not so dull as it sounds. It just means that a person is able to know that you are unhappy, and to love you extra on that account, without bothering you by telling you all the time how sorry she is for you. E. Nesbit, The Railway Children, 1908.

Our children, both born in England, grew up with foreign parents, for Paulette and I were Americans and not as familiar as we might have been with English—or British—children’s literature. From our own childhoods we knew and liked some English classics, for instance books by Carroll, Grahame, and Milne, but of E. Nesbit we knew naught. But Nesbit and some of her books are worth your acquaintance—if you’re lucky enough to have young readers or listeners available. Edith Nesbit was born in suburban London on August 15, 1858. Four years later her father’s death upended her life, and Edith grew up in quite a few places, notably in France and Spain, and for her first 18 years experienced the challenges of making do as best one could. Apart from deaths (of a brother and a sister) it was not a bad life but she may have wanted badly to escape it, and so she did, first becoming engaged (to a bank clerk) at age 17 and then becoming pregnant (to another bank clerk, Hubert Bland) at 18. She moved in with Bland but didn’t marry him until she was 7 months pregnant, and thereupon she entered on a second round of making do, for Bland was not a good earner but was a serial philanderer. So E. Nesbit set herself to writing, for children (or about them) and earned a good living. As for marriage, she was a woman who “made do.” She even adopted two of Bland’s wrong-side-of-blanket kids. She was not terribly happy about this but she loved all her children as best she could and dedicated several books to some of them. She was unconventional, too, in her political views, and ranks today (with Bland and one of his paramours) as a founder of the Fabian Society. After Bland’s death (in 1914) she married (in 1917) the much more devoted (and more ‘common’) Thomas Tucker, a ferry-boat operator. She died in 1924. In some interesting ways, her children’s books (40 of them) reflect her life (and her houses), sometimes in fantasy, often in adventure. In her stories, kids are heroes, often narrators, but even her “Wouldbegood” children can be frank and faulty, often on the same page. Beginning with her Fabian friends and then to a much wider audience (which would include, inter alia, Noel Coward, J. K. Rowling, and the aforementioned Vidal), E. Nesbit’s fictions offer children ways to “make do” with the situation into which life had cast them. Since this is the most needed skill for any child, Nesbit deserves to be read and remembered. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"The Wackiest Millionaire to Run for President"
Bernarr Macfadden, 1868-1957.
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The Wackiest Millionaire ever to Run for President. Title of an article on Bernarr Mcfadden in Money magazine. 2015.

Teenagers (including those of the male persuasion) worry too much about their appearance, and in this their insecurities are deepened by various aspects of American culture. In my case, I blame the Charles Atlas body-building ads, always framed in comic-book style, which featured a “97-pound weakling” getting sand kicked in his face by some incredible hulk who then walked off with the girl. But now I find that Atlas himself (real name Angelo Siciliano, an Italian “scrawny weakling” who saved his life by buffing up) was foisted upon us by an earlier evangelist of the body strong, a Missourian (Mill Spring, MO) who constructed for himself a similar body and, to go with it, a similar biography. Known to the world (at the height of his fame) as Bernarr Macfadden, he was born in the heart of the Ozarks as Bernard Adolphus McFadden on August 16, 1868. His frail ill health probably kept him from joining up with the James brothers, so instead of robbing banks and trains Bernard built himself up, almost from scratch, as a “physical culturist.” From early on (he was orphaned at 11) he followed a vegetarian diet (including eggs in quantity), abstained from alcohol, refrained from smoking, foreswore white bread, and by the time he’d reached his 20s made himself famous as a circus strongman and wrestler. But it was on a trip to England (1897-98) where he learned that he could make quite a lot of money at this game, teamed up with a bicycle maker (who dabbled in wall-mounted exercise contraptions) and founded a muscle magazine, called Physical Development, the first of several depressing McFadden imprints. He even set up an academy which awarded doctorates in ‘physcultopathy,’ a multi-disciplinary way to happiness which included a lot of vegetables and baths, sleeping naked on the floor, and (for female devotees) throwing away their corsets to live more naturally. Preaching “love” as a way to escape from “prudery,” Bernarr’s following grew to include Rudolph Valentino, Benito Mussolini, and Angelo Siciliano. Not that there was an Italian flavor to all this, for McFadden also converted George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, and Franklin Roosevelt, but it allows me to end with Charles Atlas who, when still Angelo Siciliano, won a body beautiful context put on by McFadden (in 1920), and then learned from the master how to extract money in bulk out of 97-pound weaklings who lived in fear of getting sand kicked in their faces. ©.
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"I believe in censorship. I've made a fortune out of it." Mae West.

Mary Jane West was born in Brooklyn on August 17, 1893, to a prize fighter and a corset model. Her family was thus not exactly working class, but might be described as ‘marginal.’ By 1930, when her mother died, Mary Jane—now ‘Mae West’—was rich enough to buy a family mausoleum at Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, its crypts now occupied by both her parents and two siblings (and by Mae herself, who died in 1980). Later that decade, when the management of Mae’s penthouse apartment barred her then current boyfriend (a black boxing champion called William Jones), she solved the problem by buying the whole complex, making Jones persona grata just as, much later, in 2009, he was posthumously inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame. So Mae challenged her society’s racial values. She’s more famous, though, for challenging American sexual mores, and in a number of ways, Her tolerant “live and let live” policy on homosexuality began with her learning her famous walk, better described as a
‘slink,’ from female impersonators. But Mae West is best known for her decidedly heterosexual persona as the classic female vamp, always ready to take her pleasure whether from the male lead, in her films, or her current amour, in her never very private life. She did so first on stage, in vaudeville and in plays (some written by herself), and didn’t take sex to Hollywood until she was in her late 30s. She caused outrage on Broadway and then in Tinseltown, but was always unapologetic. Like Mark Twain, she knew that “outrage” was good for business, and she made the most of it, turning her imprisonment (in New York, 1926, for corrupting the morals of youth through her play Sex) into a publicity stunt. Once in Hollywood, her spectacular success was partly responsible for the rise of censorship (the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934)—and then she gaily did battle with the censors. Whether she won or lost that war depends on your time frame. Certainly censorship made her later films duller, and dullness—and perhaps her advancing age—cut into her box office receipts. On the other hand, she lived long enough to see the Code die (in 1954) and to make a new name for herself (outrageously) as a night club performer, an outspoken radio personality, and, finally, as the aged (and somewhat campy?) stateswoman-heroine of a new Hollywood. ©.
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I don't care if I never see Texas again. Rafer Johnson.
Rafer Lewis Johnson, 1934-2020.
------------------------------------------------------------
I always want to win, and no one likes to lose. But when you start out on the field, everyone is equal. That is the important idea. Rafer Johnson.

Among my favorite sports stories is that about two leading competitors at the 1960 Rome Olympics, decathletes Rafer Johnson (USA) and C.K. Yang (Formosa). Both were UCLA students, and had the same coach, UCLA’s track & field supremo Elvin “Ducky” Drake. The 1500-meter run was the crucial event, one of Yang’s best and one of Johnson’s weakest. So what’s a coach to do in such a situation? Drake advised Yang to keep as far ahead of Johnson as he could, and run him into the ground. He advised Johnson to stick as close as he possibly could to Yang. They finished, Yang leading, only 1.2 seconds apart. After their points were totaled, Johnson took the gold, Yang the silver, but the best picture from Rome that year was of the two decathletes, exhausted, leaning together for mutual support, after the 1500 and while they waited for their points to be totalled. By Drake’s standard, and mine, they’d both won. Rafer Lewis Johnson was born in Texas on August 18, 1934. In order to give
themselves a better chance in life, the Johnsons moved to Kingsburg, CA. in 1943, where they became the only black family in town, and where Rafer shone in varied ways, a multitalented athlete and class president at Kingsburg High School (the “Vikings,” for Kingsburg was dominated by Swedish immigrants). Johnson went on to college athletics (at UCLA), in several sports, and decided to excel in all of them when he watched Bob Mathias win gold in the decathlon at the ’52 Olympics. In only his 4th contest, Johnson broke the world record, and came second (silver) in Melbourne in 1956. Clearly a superb athlete, Johnson went on from his Rome gold to become a model citizen. By the time he died, just last December, Johnson had distinguished himself in several civic fields, acting, politicking, and (with Eunice Kennedy Shriver) a leader of the Paralympics movement. He also carried the torch (passed to him by Jesse Owens’ granddaughter) to light the flame at the 1984 games in Los Angeles—running all the way to the top of the stadium. With his wife Elizabeth Thorsen (they married in 1971), he’d distinguished himself in the special arts of parenting and grandparenting. Johnson was of course widely mourned, not least in Kingsburg where today a public school bears his name, also in affectionate obituaries, but I’d like to take this opportunity to put in a word for Ducky Drake, who’d played his role of coach to competitive perfection in the 1960 Olympics. ©
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"You can shoot us when you like."
Gert and Daisy, Mrs. Waters' Daughters.
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You can always switch us off
When we appear before the ‘mike’,
But now we’re in the open,
You can shoot us when you like.
From the wartime signature tune of ‘Gert and Daisy’

British humour differs from the American variety in more ways than just that errant ‘u’. One instance may be found in a wartime BBC radio series designed to improve home morale despite the diet imposed by rationing. Not only did it include a comic lampooning of the ‘Woolton Pie,’ a Ministry of Food concoction very short on both meat and lard, but the whole series was called “Feed the Brute,” in which a couple of working-class women discuss how to keep their husbands happy on turnips and leeks. The material was performed (and written) by two sisters, themselves (by 1939) well-seasoned performers who became, in wartime, a national institution. Behind the mike, they called themselves Gert and Daisy, but in real life they were Doris and Elsie Waters, “Mrs. Waters’ Daughters” as proclaimed in one of their signature tunes. Elsie Waters, the elder sister, was born on August 19, 1893, in Poplar, London, within the sound of Bow Bells (so ‘Cockney’ came naturally to them). Their father was an undertaker’s assistant but soon the whole family took to the music halls as a band (with Elsie at the piano), and all too often performing for peanuts at church bazaars and temperance concerts. In the 1920s Elsie and Doris broke away, gained some success, and in 1929 broke into a BBC radio variety program, their harsh cockney making a nice change from Lord Reith’s special dialect (“BBC English”). A chance recording contract led them to produce their first ‘Gert and Daisy’ routine, based on two oldish wives taking a grimly comic view of a wedding. Much elaborated, that led in turn to real stardom, their own BBC show, and the favorable patronage of George VI’s Elizabeth (aka, later, the Queen Mother). So, come the war, Elsie and Doris (Daisy and Gert) were ready to run, and they were heavily used not only in home front broadcasts about mock meat pies and air raids but abroad, performing for the troops. Bolstered by post-war MBEs, the sisters continued to perform and write until Doris died (in 1978; Elsie died in 1990). But their radio names lived on, in two of London Zoo’s favorite elephants, and their spirit too (I see shades of Gert and Daisy in Monty Python’s drag routines). But in the long run their brother John (violinist in that first family band) gained more lasting fame. He became Jack Warner, who played PC George Dixon in the nearly endless (22 years, 1956-1978) BBC TV series “Dixon of Dock Green,” a homey and homely police drama set, of course, within the sound of Bow Bells. But it lacked the sisters’ wit. ©
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I remember Gert and Daisy well. If you want to share have a furtle HERE. they were very funny.
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Stanley wrote: 19 Aug 2021, 12:25 He became Jack Warner, who played PC George Dixon in the nearly endless (22 years, 1956-1978) BBC TV series “Dixon of Dock Green,” a homey and homely police drama set, of course, within the sound of Bow Bells.
"Evenin All" :extrawink:
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We should work as if we were to be saved by our works; and rely on Jesus Christ as if we did no works. Francis Asbury, 1745-1816.

The stupendous growth of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the early 19th-century USA owed much to the unceasing labors of its first American bishop, Francis Asbury, who was born in Staffordshire, England, on August 20, 1745. He learned industry from his father, who in negotiating England’s industrial revolution chose hard work as his path, but Joseph Asbury found solace in the ale house, so Francis’s spiritual life was shaped by his saintly mother, Elizabeth, whose own conversion came by the means of itinerant preachers. Aged only 22, Francis was assigned to preach the gospel by none other than John Wesley, and then traveled to America to take up his employment there as a colonial itinerant. In a sense he never got beyond that, for all his life he traveled, thousands of miles, on horseback or by carriage, north and south while the population was confined to the seaboard, but then (more famously) east and west as the new nation’s population exploded and overflowed the Appalachians to fill the great watershed beyond. His popularity grew rapidly, so much so that when the few remaining American Methodists clergy (most had fled back to Britain) convened in late 1784 to decide how to negotiate American independence they chose Asbury as their first bishop. By the time Asbury died, in 1816, there was no doubt that the Methodists were an American communion, with over 200,000 tithing members and growing just about as fast as Asbury himself, and his circuit riders, could preach and pray and convince (or ‘convict’, as Asbury put it) these mobile Americans to adopt new methods and become new Methodists. Taken together, they were in theological and ecclesiastical terms a strange concoction, free-willers in terms of the evangelical conversion of the laity, while the ministers on circuit were but soldiers-in-arms at the orders of the bishops (soon each state would have one) with Asbury as commander-in-chief. As a whole, the church would eventually settle down to a staid respectability (as Martin Marty put it, a nation of believers became a nation of behavers) but meanwhile Asbury had readied Methodists, laity and clergy, to take leading roles in the avalanche of religious revival and social reform we now call the Second Great Awakening. It was a sign and symbol of the new denomination that Francis Asbury was not formally ordained a minister until the day he became a bishop. ©.
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'That's all, folks' Fritz Freleng of Kansas City
------------------------------------------------------------
Anyone a you lily-livered, bow-legged varmints care to slap leather with me, in case any of you git ideas you better know who you're dealin' with. I'm Yosemite Sam. The roughest, toughest, he-man stuffest hombre as ever crossed the Rio Grande...and I aint no namby-pamby. Yosemite Sam, one of several Fritz Freleng characters.

In the movies’ golden age Hollywood gathered talents of all sorts and from everywhere, all meshed together in the sunshine weather and boom-town mentality of southern California to produce classic films, the star system, the writers’ colonies (or prison camps), legions of yes-men, and all presided over by the movie moguls and their production studios. It’s more difficult to biograph the (roughly) coterminous golden age of the cartoon, also centered on Hollywood but differently casted, a ragtag bunch of gifted people who were grunts at some times and geniuses at others, humble illustrators now, then unemployed, and now and again running the show at this or that cartoon sweatshop. However, it seems highly suspicious (or merely random) that so many of them seemed to come from Kansas City, Missouri. Of these transplants, Walt Disney was obviously the most successful (and in some tellings the most ruthless), but there was also Fritz Freleng, born Isadore Freleng on August 21, 1905, and
who got involved (as a teenager!!) in illustrating pictures that moved. He was among several Disney acquaintances who moved with Walt from KC to LA, or followed him there, or in Freleng’s case was invited by Walt. Once settled, or unsettled, they worked their magics both cooperatively and competitively, which often makes it difficult to credit any one of them with any one of the classic cartoon stars, but after Freleng fell out with Disney he seems to have been the creator, or co-creator, or exploiter, of many cartoon icons, most famously Bugs Bunny (and it was probably Freleng who recruited Bugs’s voice, Mel Blanc, who was not from Kansas City) but also Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the cat and Sylvester’s never-quite-cooked meal, Tweety the bird, Yosemite Sam and, latterly, the Pink Panther. Of all those, the one most surely a Freleng creation was Yosemite Sam, but we know that mainly because of the striking resemblance between Sam and Fritz (although you do have to trim
Yosemite’s facial hair to see the likeness). But after Freleng parted from Disney (which was very soon),he moved so quickly and so often from studio to studio, sometimes as executive (as at Looney Tunes), sometimes as sweated co-worker, that it’s usually more difficult to determine parentage or descent. But Freleng won four Oscars, and he lived a long time and with the same wife (Lily Schoenfield, whom he married in 1932), and Lily had eight of Fritz’s characters engraved on his tombstone in 1995. So he owned them, and he must have made them. ©
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Ruth Underhill, 1883-1984.
------------------------------------------------------------
If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934.

Ruth Murray Underhill’s life began in Ossining, NY, on August 22, 1883, as the eldest child of a prosperous Wall Street lawyer and a Quaker mother. Underhill later said that she had two lives, and one might say that the first one was shaped by her family’s prosperity and the second by her mother’s sense of mission. She was certainly well educated, graduating Phi Beta Kappa at Vassar in 1905 and, through European travel (mountain climbing and camping trips, with some study breaks) she achieved fluency in several modern languages, which she used to good effect as social worker in Boston, a volunteer nurse in WWI, and then as a writer. But while her brother and sister made their own quite distinctive lives (sister as a leading banker and brother as a Harvard academic), Ruth settled down (as her mother had) as a lawyer’s wife, marrying in 1919. But he turned out to be “the wrong man,” though perhaps pleasant enough (their 1929 divorce is recorded to have been amicable), and now, well
into her 40s, Ruth Underhill set out to do “something to help humanity.” Thanks to Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, at Columbia, that turned out to be anthropology, where Ruth at first recorded the lives and culture of the Tohono O’odham Indians (a Pima tribe) in southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Seeing her academic task as a matter of trust, she entered the tribe by friendship with an elderly Tohono woman, lived with the band on and off for a decade, during which Underhill wrote her PhD and then followed it up with an ‘autobiography’ of her hostess, Maria Chona. Ruth’s residence with and study of this people (the Tohonos’ tribal name simply means “people of the desert”) helped to stimulate a Tohono cultural revival, which persists to this day in what is now the USA’s third largest ‘reservation.’ For Ruth Underhill, it led to a long career in tribal welfare (ecology and agriculture) and education, mainly working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Having started late, Ruth never really retired, but later held working posts with several universities and museums, especially in Colorado. Underhill also received several honors and awards recognizing her pioneering work in first nation education and welfare, including from the Tohono themselves. She died just short of her 101st birthday, in mid-August 1984, so her second life lasted 55 years. ©.
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I am the master of my fate,// I am the captain of my soul
"Invictus".
------------------------------------------------------------
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”

The movie Invictus (2009) got its title not from the book on which it is based (John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation (2008), but rather from a scene in which the Mandela character reads a Victorian poem (“Invictus”) to the captain of the South Africa’s national rugby team. The poem’s Latin title means unconquered or unconquerable, and its concluding lines read, defiantly, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
The book and the film make a great story (I read the book, then watched the film). Inspired by Mandela’s example, the South African “Springboks” take the field and, in a classic match, also the world cup final, beat the heavily-favored New Zealand “All Blacks.” Well, the virtue of being reasonably well educated often carries with it the vice of making judgments too hastily or too casually, and in telling Paulette about the film I casually credited “Invictus” to Alfred Tennyson. I have an excuse (Tennyson, indeed, is my excuse); but the real author of the poem was William Ernest Henley, born in Gloucester, England, on August 23, 1849. Tennyson mayhap did know Henley. A lot of literary people did, for Henley was a literary chap whose life composed an almost perfect Victorian melodrama in which courage struggles against impossible odds and still wins the game. In Henley’s case that was a set of illnesses, the most serious of which (tuberculosis of the bone) cost him a leg, lengthy hospital stays, and a semi-successful (but miraculous) treatment by a famous surgeon, Joseph Lister, another Victorian hero. That ordeal brought Henley to the attention of Robert Louis Stevenson and then other litterateurs, for Henley also became a good writer on his own, and not just poetry. Henley is said to have been the inspiration of Stevenson’s Long John Silver (although Silver was a sort of anti-hero, he was—suitably—missing a leg). For good measure, Henley’s sickly daughter became J. M. Barrie’s inspiration for the girl hero in Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, for she struggled against her own problems by imaginative play with a doll called Wendy. Anyway, it’s a moral tale. And if you are momentarily down on your luck, or just down, and would like to be “up” instead, “Invictus” is a good poem to read; Invictus is a good movie to watch; and Playing the Enemy is an uplifting tale to read, for it’s about a great man winning out in a difficult situation. And Lord Tennyson had nothing to do with any of it. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

Post by Tripps »

Thanks Uncle Bob (again)
Well that's got me going good and proper. There's more to it than I've written below, but it's a bit personal.

Leaving aside the word 'litterateur' - is that better than being just a 'writer'?

I think Gloria Gaynor must have read it. :smile:

I find that 'fell' means 'fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible' . Like Shakespeare's ' one fell swoop'. Often renderd wrongly today as ''one foul swoop'.

The last verse is a puzzle. Don't get the gate thing. Thought perhaps he meant gait referring to his lack of a leg, and difficulty walking; but no - looks like it's from the BIble

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."


I think 'bloody but unbowed' is also a legacy of this work.

"The menace of the years" - tell me about it. :smile:

Powerful stuff. . . .

Invictus By William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Born to be mild
Sapere Aude
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Preferred pronouns - Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine
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Stanley
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Re: BOB'S BITS

Post by Stanley »

'Gait' or 'gate'. The origin of the pub name 'Crossed Gates' at Blacko, it's on a road junction where three 'gaits' meet.
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