BOB'S BITS

[Tripps]

I attended the same school as this chap. Due to this I took an interest and have a couple of his books. I read his autobiography, and I also saw an interview on TV. I was not impressed.
I classified him as a 'phony'.

[Stanley]

Interesting David and I wouldn't argue with you. I'll forward your comment to Bob.....

[Stanley]

He agrees David but also said it depended which AB you were looking at......

Think of what you will be five years hence!! Mary Taylor to Charlotte Bronte, 1845 (urging Charlotte to leave home).

In her too short time, Charlotte Bronte gained some unusual perspectives on life, and one important source was Mary Taylor, whom Charlotte met at boarding school in 1831. Charlotte was 16, and she found in Mary Taylor (then 15) a source of constant astonishment and her society “one of the most rousing pleasures I have ever known.” For Mary and Charlotte were just about as different as you could get in the north of England, in the early 19th century, and still be at the same boarding school. Mary (born near Leeds 200 years ago today, February 26, 1817) was of radical dissenting stock (the Taylors were “New Connexions” Methodists) and came from a family home that, even after her father’s bankruptcy, pulsated with light and good cheer and encouraged Mary (and her brothers and sister) to step out of line and be somebody. Mary’s school rebellions did not get her expelled but kept her in trouble, and made Charlotte “morally certain [that] Mary will establish her own landmarks.” And so she did, in a life that took her to Belgium, then Germany (where she taught “dull” young men English and herself algebra “because it is odd for a woman to learn it”), and then New Zealand where she amassed enough capital (she kept a shop at Wellington) to retire back to Yorkshire where, in her leisure, she continued to upset apple carts and defy expectations as a mountaineer and as a campaigner and publicist for women’s rights. Among the first of those rights, Mary Taylor thought, was “the duty of earning money” not to amass wealth (for other than investing in Swiss mountaineering holidays Mary gave most of hers away) but to strengthen character. When in 1845 Mary Taylor sailed for New Zealand she had urged Charlotte Bronte also to leave home. It is interesting to think what might have been had Charlotte accepted the challenge laid down by her unusual schoolmate. ©

[Stanley]

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. John Steinbeck, 1945.

On my 14th birthday, our neighbor (Jean Lodwick, who taught Junior High English) asked me my age. And when I told her, she said, “well, then, you’re old enough for these,” and gave me two novels, Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954). It was a liberating gift, these stories of seaside down-and-outers, the prostitutes of the Bear Flag, Dora Flood their warm-hearted madam, the heavenly-cynical grocer Lee Chong, Mack and his boys including the slow-witted Hazel, and Doc, the proprietor of Western Biological Laboratories and its slightly odder community of sea urchins, octopi, and starfish. All—mainly the people—were specimens for John Steinbeck’s laboratory researches into human nature. At 14 it was exciting to read about prostitutes, I suppose, but what I remember best are the manifold kindnesses these roughs showed to one another. Dora Flood feeds the hungry, Lee Chong lets debts ride so his customers can eat, Mack and Eddie make sure the boys have enough drink to keep them going, and everyone worried about Doc, who had more education than the rest of them put together and therefore more to worry about. John Steinbeck was born not far from Cannery Row, in Salinas, on February 27, 1902. He grew up prosperous, and when he decided to write his dad kept him and his wife, Carol, in groceries and typing paper. Then when his dad failed in the 1930s they went on welfare and lived a bit like the folks of the Row. They also met Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, who befriended the couple, gave Carol a job, and clearly became the Doc of the novel. Steinbeck’s greatest novels, Tortilla Flat and Grapes of Wrath, were published in the depression decade, and probably won him the 1962 Nobel Prize, but for a teen-aged boy in Des Moines, in 1957, John Steinbeck had packed all human life into the Palace, The Bear Flag, Lee Chong’s Grocery, and the tumbledown shacks that lined Cannery Row. ©

[Stanley]

If I cannot do a thing absolutely and completely, I do not want to do it at all. From Geraldine Farrar's autobiography, 1935.

Today baseball pitchers husband their arms and operatic sopranos husband their vocal chords. But it was not always so, and many careers burnt out early from overexploitation of those precious resources. We can take for example Geraldine Farrar, particularly appropriate for her dad, Sid Farrar, pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics. Geraldine Farrar was born in Massachusetts on February 28, 1882. Her proud parents quickly noted something about her voice, and in 1887 took her to Boston for voice training. Geraldine was giving professional recitals by 1896. Then she went to Europe (Paris and Berlin) for further training, and in 1901 sang the main soprano role in Gounod’s Faust at Berlin’s Hofoper. Her voice, her beauty, and above all her dramatic talents made her a European sensation. Along the way she made several romantic conquests, including the German Crown Prince, and indeed her affairs—most of them rumored—heightened her appeal to certain segments of the operatic audience. By the time she was 25, New York wanted to hear her, and to see her, so she debuted at the Met in that year and joined the company permanently in 1907. There she sang and sang and sang, starred in several silent films (including De Mille’s silent of Bizet’s Carmen, which does strike one as odd), made love to Arturo Toscanini (and nearly ended his marriage), made many pioneer recordings for Victor, and even sang for an experimental radio broadcast. Between 1906 and 1922, for the Met alone, Farrar sang 29 lead roles in 672 performances (including 95 as Madam Butterfly and 58 as Carmen). She had an enthusiastic following, especially among young women who were known as ‘Farrar’s Flappers.’ Voice almost gone, she retired in 1922 and lived on her profits, and her memories, until 1967. Her memorials are two stars in Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and a handsome grave marker, in Connecticut, that recalls also her father, her mother, and her sister Alice. ©

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I have very little regard for consensus if it blinds you to the truth. Harry Belafonte, quoted in The Guardian, 2007.

Until I read a recent New York Times piece on him and Sidney Poitier (the occasion was Poitier’s 90th birthday), I’d always thought of Harry Belafonte as an immigrant. It was his West Indian accent and the way he burst upon my teen-aged consciousness as the consummate artist of calypso (in the eponymous 1956 album) and its “Banana Boat Song.” But he was born in Harlem, on March 1, 1927, so today he’s caught up with his old Bahamian friend Poitier. At birth he was Harold George Bellanfonti, Jr., and he picked up his accent from his parents, both West Indian immigrants, and from eight years (1932-40) living with his grandma in Jamaica. A bright lad, he attended a special high school in New York. Its alumni include Alan Greenspan, a classmate, Henry Kissinger, and Jacob Javits, but Belafonte never graduated. Instead he drifted into the navy, right at the war’s end, and then discovered that he wanted to act. He was without much training, though, so the American Negro Theatre took him on as a stage hand. There he met Poitier (working as a janitor) and the two became best friends and foils, challenging each other to succeed. And so they did, Belafonte via the New School’s Dramatic Workshop (and those recordings, which included jazz and folk as well as calypso). By the mid 1950s he was a star, but his temperament (Paul Robeson was his hero) and his times meant he would be a different sort of black actor than most who had gone before. Increasingly, Belafonte became known as a civil rights activist, friend and advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and often seen on the front lines of demonstrations and marches. Along the way he’s picked up additional political experience in the anti-apartheid movement and working for the ACLU and (for African famine relief) with UNICEF. I think he’s stopped acting, but this native son is still very political. Happy Birthday to Harry Belafonte, only 90 today. ©

[Stanley]

Every time I sign a ball, and there have been thousands, I thank my luck that I wasn't born Coveleski or Wambsgnass or Peckinpaugh. Mel Ott.

Time was when National League clubs were known for their hustle, their canny managers, their great fielders, while the American League was the redoubt of the slugger. The Cardinals’ “Gas House Gang” epitomized this kind of baseball. And so even the greatest of NL batsmen, Mel Ott of the Giants (New York, that is) could not hold a candle to the Bambino across town. When Ott finally retired (he’d worked out the last six years of his 22 as Giants’ player-manager) he held just about every National League batting record that was worth holding, including 511 home runs and 488 doubles, eight straight 100+ RBI seasons and a lifetime .304 batting average. Plus Ott often (six times) led the league in walks, so his on-base percentage was .414. Melvin Thomas Ott was born just outside of New Orleans on March 2, 1909. His dad and two uncles played semi-pro ball, and they tutored Mel especially in fielding skills, but somehow he picked up a magic way with the bat, and it was as a batsman that the legendary John McGraw picked him up for the Giants for a $400 signing bonus in 1926. McGraw, tough, profane, and a heavy drinker, oddly took the boy under his wing, nurtured him at the Polo Grounds (rather than sending him off to the minors), and kept him away from the dissolute influence of the team’s older players. It worked. Two years on, young Mel Ott (still only 19) took over as the Giants’ right fielder and stayed there until his knees took him to third base in 1944 (a year in which he won a popular poll as baseball’s best right fielder and its best third baseman). Ott was too small to be a power hitter and certainly too small to be a demon outfielder, but he was both. Into the bargain, he seems to have been a nice guy, too. And in due course the National League gave up its adherence to the “dead ball” and gave Willie Mays and Hank Aaron a chance to chase the Bambino. ©

[Stanley]

Don't give me books for Christmas; I already have a book. Jean Harlow.

In early 1937 Jean Harlow traveled cross-country to be one of the star attractions at Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday party on January 30. There’s a publicity picture taken on the steps of the White House, a couple of opera stars, a ballerina, and Robert Taylor, but at the center is Jean Harlow, the Blond Bombshell, resplendent in mink, arm in arm with Eleanor Roosevelt who is doing her very best to smile: a study in contrasts and odd beginnings, for it was the launch party of what became the March of Dimes. What’s not evident in the photo is that Harlow was ill, and a few months later (in June) would be dead of kidney disease. The movie she was making (Saratoga, with Clark Gable) would still run as a Harlow film (it was finished out with doubles and dubbing) and did very well at the box office, but Harlow and her magic were gone, and she was only 26. Harlean Harlow Carpenter, aka Jean Harlow, was born in Kansas City on March 3, 1911, to wealthy parents who were not suited to one another. It was a stormy, unhappy household, and Harlean (already known as “The Baby”) would be at the center of a custody tug of war that, eventually, her mother won. So when The Baby was 12, mommy Jean dragged her off to Hollywood. It was her mother who wanted to be a star, but instead (a few years and a short Kansas City society marriage later) it was Harlean who caught eyes and stoked fantasies. She used her mother’s maiden name, Jean Harlow, appeared first in silents, then with Laurel and Hardy, and then with her first talkie, Hell’s Angels, became a star in a flurry of films, 1931-36, appearing with Hollywood’s greatest male heart-throbs. Harlow was a sensation in other ways, with amorous affairs and suspicious deaths thrown in, and her trip to DC in 1937 may have been yet another studio attempt to provide her with a more “acceptable” persona. But her kidneys, weakened by a childhood bout of scarlet fever, ended that story line, too. ©

[Stanley]

If you can be the best, why not try to be the best? Garrett Morgan.

In 1916, in Cleveland, Ohio, an explosion in a water intake tunnel being trapped several workers, and two rescuers who ventured down the tunnel had not come back. Then someone remembered that a local man, Garrett Morgan, had patented a “safety hood” said to make it possible for rescuers to enter burning buildings and avoid smoke inhalation. Morgan and his brother Frank rushed to the scene, donned their hoods, rescued the rescuers, and then helped to bring out other survivors and the bodies of those who had died. Cleveland nominated several rescuers to receive special “Carnegie Medals,” but did not include Garrett or Frank Morgan. It’s reasonably clear that the “oversight” was because Garrett and Frank were black. Garrett Morgan was born in Kentucky on March 4, 1877, the son of former slaves whose master had been the Confederate cavalry hero Colonel John Morgan. Garrett took the surname but left Kentucky for the free state of Ohio, where he led a long and productive life as an entrepreneur and inventor. Besides the smoke hood (which was widely used before scientific gas masks), he clocked inventions for the sewing industry and cosmetics. He is also credited with adding amber to automatic stop lights, which before his patent 1475024 offered only the choices of stop or go. To Garrett Morgan, caution seemed a good idea; in promoting his safety hood he often used a white man to pose as its inventor. So Morgan probably wasn’t surprised by his exclusion from the Carnegie award (a group of private citizens made good on the “oversight” with a more elaborate medal for him). But he was not at all passive in the matter of racial equality. Garrett Morgan had helped to found the Cleveland Call and Post, a pioneer black daily, and was a founder-member of the Cleveland chapter of the NAACP and of Cleveland’s all-black Wakeman Country Club. If you can’t beat ‘em, don’t join ‘em. ©

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We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands. Austen Henry Layard, on the beginnings of his explorations at Nineveh.

To regard 19th-century British imperialism as a monolith of cultural superiority and economic exploitation is a mistake. The whole exercise (as bad as it could get) spawned or reinforced some progressive strains in British society and attracted interesting oddballs, servants of empire who showed a proclivity for upsetting the imperial applecart. Among these was Sir Austen Henry Layard, dismissed in disgrace in 1881 as ambassador to the Ottomans because his sympathy for the Turks (as opposed to their Balkan Christian subjects and their Russian rivals) had gone too far. He returned not home but to Venice where he amassed a remarkable art collection (later a bequest to the National Gallery) and wrote up his memoirs. They sold well, for before Layard became an unconventional diplomat (he debuted in the 1850s as a strong critic of Britain’s Crimean adventure), he had lived an unconventional life. Born in a Paris hotel on March 5, 1817, Henry Layard (as he preferred to be known) might best be considered as a true child of the Romantic Age. After an unsuccessful attempt to train up for a respectable profession, he set off in 1839 for the Middle East with a vague commission from the Royal Geographic Society to look around for things archaeological. His ready absorption of local languages and customs, his courage, and his intelligence brought Britain rewards, many of which can be seen today in the spectacular long gallery of the British Museum, the massive relics of Assyria (from Nimrud and Nineveh) and Babylon. Layard rode his resulting fame into parliament (from a working-class constituency), several critical ambassadorships (including Risorgimento Italy and Bourbon Spain), and into a late marriage (1869) with a young woman (Mary Enid Guest) every bit his equal and (some allege) the daughter of his former lover. In 1894 he was cremated, thus avoiding the “odious practice of interment.” ©

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Carving is easy. You just go down to the skin and stop. Michelangelo.

The Medicis have a lot to answer for, plotting and poisoning their way through a couple of centuries of European history, and then bequeathing us a stupendously awful TV series, but they have saving graces. Most notably, they were discerning patrons of the arts. Perhaps the most lavish of the Medici patrons was Queen Catherine, regent of France and the mother of three French kings (1519-1589), but it was in its home base, Florence, that the family had its most spectacular artistic successes, especially during the life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-92). Among the many great artists in Lorenzo’s stable were the two who could claim supremacy, to give them their short names Michelangelo and Leonardo. Indeed they did claim supremacy, and their rivalry is one of the more interesting stories of the Renaissance. The younger of the two, Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarotti Simoni, was born on March 6, 1475. When his mother died, in 1481, his father farmed him out to a local stonecutter, one of the more fateful adoptions in human history, for Michelangelo Buonarotti would become a magical translator of marble blocks into stone statues that breathe and weep (the Pietà, 1499) or arrest us in admiration of their sheer beauty (David, 1504). As a youth, his talents were noticed, first by an advantageous apprenticeship in sculpture and then, when he was only 14, by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who brought him into Florence’s humanist academy (and into the Medici household). In the turbulent politics of Italy there could be no lasting comfort, but through it all the Medicis survived and Michelangelo prospered, usually but not always in tandem. It was under other patrons that Michelangelo began and completed his greatest paintings and frescoes, including the fantastical Sistine Chapel ceiling, The Last Judgement (1534-41). Michelangelo’s many other talents would (though not so varied as Leonardo’s) require a much longer note. ©

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Our culture decides, quite arbitrarily, what is waste and rubbish, but . . . I like to make use of everything. Eduardo Paolozzi.

President Trump’s deplorable immigration orders, a message that “we” are at war with Islam, are in perspective yet another chapter in the deplorable treatment of “enemy aliens” in wartime. And in this “we” are not alone. In Scotland, when in June 1940 Italy declared war on Britain, the Paolozzi family suffered grievously, their Edinburgh sweets shop looted and wrecked, and then to add insult to injury the father and other male kin arrested and interned as enemy aliens even though the whole clan had settled there, ca. 1910-1925, prospered, and raised children with Edinburgh accents. Among these Italo-Scot kids was Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, born on March 7, 1924, who would repay all these unkindnesses with a life of artistic creativity (and artistic generosity) that eventually brought him a knighthood and scattered his works all over Europe and even in the USA (although his savage satires on the Viet Nam War lost him some market value). Paolozzi is sometimes regarded as a pop artist, but preferred to think of himself as an artist of modern culture. And though he is mainly famous for his sculptures, he distinguished himself also in textiles and print-making. He first began to be noticed in Paris, after the war, and then in Britain in the 1950s with his “junk” sculptures, then in the USA. Today he might have more large works in Germany than anywhere else, notably those lining the Rhine in Cologne. Wherever, many of his “public” works were given away, or sold cheaply, including his monumental (possibly ironic?) tribute to the Italian community in Edinburgh. Certainly ironic is his most famous (or most often pictured) work, Newton after Blake, which sits massively and beautifully (and ambiguously, it seems to me) in the courtyard of the British Library, London. There it maps our modern universe. Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, enemy alien, creative artist, and benefactor, died in London in the spring of 2005. ©

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Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing––absolutely nothing––half so much worth doing as messing about in boats. Ratty, in The Wind in the Willows.

Cookham in Berkshire is still a sprawling parish that contains three distinct villages, Cookham itself, Cookham Rise, and Cookham Dean. All three abut the River Thames in one of its most charming stretches, containing not only Cookham Lock but three islands and several channels that are negotiable by small boats and punts. It also has much common land and contains Quarry Wood, a darkish place. This is most likely where Mole learned from Ratty how to boat, to enjoy the sunlight (along with rather magnificent picnics), and to admire the great, rough, gruff Badger who feared nothing, not even the stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood. For it was here, in Cookham Dean, that Kenneth Grahame and his three siblings were brought up by their maternal grandmother, Granny Ingles, and their uncle David, curate at Cookham Dean. All four had been born in Scotland, Kenneth Grahame in Edinburgh on March 8, 1859, and translated to rural Berkshire when their mother died in childbirth in 1864. There was enough money for Grahame to attend private school, but not enough for him to go on to Oxford, and in 1879 he settled down to a life in the Bank of England, interrupted only by marriage (1899, to Elspeth Thompson), the birth of a willful but sickly child, Alastair (1900), and a bit of writing and story-telling in his spare time. When Alastair was born the story-telling picked up a bit, and when he retired from the bank and went back to Cookham Dean, Kenneth Graham reworked some of the stories (including Mole, Ratty, Badger, those troublesome stoats, and the recklessly willful Mr. Toad, perhaps modeled on Alastair) into The Wind in the Willows (1908). This summer, we are staying for a couple of days near Cookham Dean, and perhaps we’ll have a picnic there, by the river, and, with any luck, find a boat to mess about in. ©

[Stanley]

She saw me sitting there . . . with change of a fin on the bar, decided I could afford a wet evening for two and walked over with her hips waving hello. Mickey Spillane, The Big Kill, 1951.

It seems odd that in a country so enamored of “law and order” the crime fiction genre should be so popular. We throw teenagers into jail for quite minor offenses (where they can learn to be real criminals), but make bestsellers of novels that come on cheap paper and sell violence at a quantity discount. Perhaps it’s not a paradox at all. But even crime fiction moves with the times. So it was that Mickey Spillane’s novels sold tens of millions of copies during after the Eisenhower years but went out of print during the presidency of Bill Clinton. They’ve turned up again, like a bad penny, as e-books and really cheap reprints, but one has hopes that they appeal to a declining market. As a Saturday Review critic said of his first best-seller (in 1947), Spillane’s books are full of “Lurid action, lurid characters, lurid writing, lurid plot, lurid finish. Verdict: Lurid.” Mickey Spillane was born Brooklyn Irish on March 9, 1918, and died a Jehovah’s Witness in a South Carolina millionaire’s resort in 2006. Along the way he got a high school education, served in the Army Air Corps during WWII, learned he could write, and after a brief adventure with Captain Marvel comics wrote his first Mike Hammer novel, I, The Jury, in two weeks. It’s not clear whether any of the other 44 novels took much longer. They were mostly Mike Hammer vehicles. His other heroes were Mako Hooker and Tiger Mann, names that convey Spillane’s favorite flavor and helped him to win a set of objectionable friends including the objectivist faux philosopher and patron saint of Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand. Given that, it’s interesting that one of Spillane’s leading characteristics, as a writer, was his extreme misogyny. That was established from the first. The villain in I, The Jury, Charlotte Manning, (yet another interesting Spillane name) was guilty (among other crimes) of having “gone into the frailty of men and seen their weaknesses.” Bang!! ©

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It is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832.

In the 1830s, two foreigners produced books about the USA that became classics. The one that Americans loved to read (when translated) was by Alexis de Tocqueville: de la démocratie en Amérique (2 vols., 1832, 1840). The other was Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (2 vols., 1832). In her view we hadn’t any, unless it was the pieties we paraded while whipping slaves and dispossessing Indians. As for our eating etiquettes, we “swallowed without chewing” food so execrable that it had to be washed down by quantities of raw spirits that sliced our throats and reduced us to stupors. We lacked aesthetic taste, too, and had transformed a beautiful land into a cultural desert (or swamp) in which evangelical preachers dulled our minds with infantile theologies and frightened our children with hell-fire sermons. It sold like wildfire. In Britain it appeared just in time to become an inspiration in the Conservative argument against the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Frances Trollope was born a vicar’s daughter on March 10, 1779, and in 1808 traded a pleasant and inventive father for an irascible lawyer who beat her seven children, became addled by the drug he took for migraines, and yet failed to make ends meet. Desperate for relief and release, Frances traveled to Tennessee (in 1827) to join Fanny Wright’s utopian socialist settlement at Nashoba. That was really a swamp, so Frances and a couple of her children moved on to Cincinnati, which (if you read her Domestic Manners) didn’t suit her, either. Domestic Manners established Frances as a writer of note (travel, fiction, and memoirs), found her a prosperous living, and inspired her surviving children (including the novelist Anthony) with her loving care and her intelligent eye. And we can still learn much from her about our Jacksonian forbears who did, after all, whip their slaves, violently dispossess the natives, and drink way too much bad booze. ©

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It may not be cool, but it's restrained, it's elegant, and it works. From a 2012 review of the renovations at the Tate Britain.

When in 1897 Henry Tate was offered a knighthood (apparently for the third time), he was going to turn it down again. But this time a high tory friend, Lord Salisbury, convinced him otherwise. Surely he would not want to snub Queen Victoria yet again? So a year later Mr. Tate became Sir Henry Tate, and one hopes that her majesty was amused. Tate had done his best to live a life of self-effacement, and many of his gifts (to Liverpool, to the Unitarian Church, to Manchester College, Oxford) had been made anonymously or in near secrecy. He had been open-minded, too: besides high tory friends he had low working-class ones, and among his benefactions had been libraries and meeting rooms in and around his sugar works in Liverpool and Brixton. In the 1890s he made balancing gifts (in the millions in modern ££s) to Liverpool’s two main hospitals, the homeopathic Hahnemann and the allopathic Royal Infirmary. It all befit the 11th (of a dozen) children (Henry Tate was born in mid Lancashire on March 11, 1819) of a humble Unitarian clergyman schoolmaster. What was a bit more surprising was that Henry became a great retail and industrial entrepreneur who (among other things) brought the sugar cube to the British teacup. Along the way, apparently guided by both his first (Jane Wignall) and second (Amy Hislop) wives, Tate developed a fine eye for fine art and amassed a remarkable collection. Old and ill, he had by 1890 decided to give this away, too, to the nation, but the nation wouldn’t have the whole thing, and so Henry Tate built his own museum, filled it up, and gave that to the nation. When you visit London, you should take in the National Gallery of British Art, today better known as The Tate Britain (there’s another Tate, the Tate Modern, down the river). And when you are there, order a cuppa in the café and drop a sugar cube in it. It would be the right thing to do. ©

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I didn't want, and never played, the genteel parts, the English-rose type. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm not altogether English. Googie Withers.

Despite the post facto propaganda of Niall Ferguson, the “Raj” (British rule of the Indian subcontinent) has a lot to answer for. On the other hand, it has “given back,” at least to “the West,” not least the immortal Spike Milligan (The Goon Show, Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall), born in Ahmednagar in April 1918. And only a year earlier, in Karachi, on March 12, 1917, the Withers’ imperial ménage was blessed by the arrival of Georgette Lizette, her father Edgar a captain in the Royal Indian Navy and her mother Lizette a rather fetching woman of mixed (Dutch, German, and French) descent. Baby Georgette was immediately christened “Googie” by her ayah (nanny), not pidgin for Georgette but Hindi for “little pigeon.” And it was as Googie Withers that, in 1929, she made her stage debut in London. That was kids’ stuff, but elder bit parts (dancing and light comedy) came along, and by the time Googie Withers was grown to maturity (and become at least as fetching as her mother), and it was time to put her up in lights, a producer told her to change her name to something with star quality. The young (she was 24) lady refused, noting that “someone called ‘Ginger’ was doing rather well despite her name.” Googie as Googie starred for Alfred Hitchcock, Terence Rattigan, and Michael Powell, but then met and (in 1948) married an Aussie actor, John McCallum, and the couple decided that film and family didn’t mix. From the 1950s they lived in Australia and Googie worked almost exclusively live, on stage. Children grown, Withers returned occasionally to London’s West End in signature roles in modern classics (Shaw, Chekhov, Ionesco, etc.), twice sharing star billing with daughter Joanna. Her farewell London appearance (2002) was in Lady Windermere’s Fan. That’s not counting her (and John’s) memorial service at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, in November 2011. But the stars weren’t there. John had died in February 2010, Googie in July 2011. ©

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Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points. Percival Lowell.

Boston is, famously, a ‘bean town’ built on cod, “where the Lowells talk only to Cabots.// and the Cabots talk only to God.” Appropriately, that doggerel was first uttered in an alumni dinner toast at Holy Cross College, in 1910, then educating young Irishmen who couldn’t get in to, or were not allowed to enter, Harvard. As for the Lowells, they epitomized Brahmin snobbery to Holy Cross alumni, but their modern money came from industry, and they themselves had replaced an earlier snobbery, that of the Adamses, Brookses, Nortons, and Eliots. Perhaps that was why, at 39, Percival Lowell decided to forsake the family’s cotton mills (located, of course, in Lowell) for a life of science. Born on March 13, 1855, Lowell had (of course) attended Harvard and, profiting from the modernizing of the curriculum (led by an Eliot: a Lowell—Percival’s brother—would replace Eliot in 1909), studied mathematics. After travel in Asia (about which he wrote several good books), Percival settled down to the cotton business, but only briefly, and in 1894 decided to use cotton money to establish the Lowell Observatory. He chose Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, where land was cheap, air was clear and nights were dark, and there, using his new telescope and his old mathematics, decided that the orbital irregularities of Neptune and Uranus indicated a large planet (“Planet X”, he called it) further out. He also decided (and spent much time and money demonstrating) that the Martian ‘canals’ were indeed canals. Lowell died in 1916, but when “X” was finally discovered (in 1930 by Lowell astronomer Clyde Tombaugh), it was named after Lowell, “P-L” being his monogram signature. Sadly, Pluto is no longer a planet (by Newton’s math, it isn’t big enough to perturb Neptune), those canals have also been exploded, and “P-L” now figures as less a pioneer than a popularizer of science: an odd fate for a brilliant Boston Brahmin. And “Pluto” is a Disney dog (b. 1930 and still with us.) ©

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Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes. Sylvia Beach.

Sylvia Beach was born in New Jersey on March 14, 1887. I’ve “done” her, four years ago: how her little bookshop in Paris’s rue de l’Odéon became famous as a redoubt for “lost generation” writers in the 1920s, occasionally publishing their books (especially those too hot for mainstream publishers to handle), and when they were down on their luck giving them books to read, food to eat, and occasionally a bed to sleep on. The Germans closed it down in 1940 and Beach never reopened. But I recently came across new information about the bookshop’s longer life, in the form of Jeremy Mercer’s Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. (2005). By the time Mercer arrived (the shop had moved to rue de la Bûcherie) on a cold, rainy, windy day in the 1990s, the place was still at work. He chatted with the assistant about his writing ambitions, his adventures, his poverty, he bought a vintage (not rare book) copy of Joyce’s Ulysses (Sylvia Beach had published the original in 1922). Mercer was then invited upstairs, given a cup of hot tea, a casse-croûte, and a bed. He stayed there several months, got his act together, and started to write. According to the current owner, Sylvia Beach Whitman (whose father bought it from Beach and who, clearly, is named after her), the shop continues to lend what it can, sell what it must, and provide lodging for young writers who’d like to stop a while (and usually join the sales staff). Since 1951 (when her dad reopened the shop), Shakespeare & Co. has “slept” over 30,000 people, mostly in beds set up between the bookshelves. Its motto is still “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise.” It is a good motto for our troubled times and stands as a suggestion that the good people do can live after them. So, let’s raise a toast to Sylvia Beach on her 130th birthday. ©

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There has been no particular outbreak or prevalence of cholera in this part of London except among the persons who were in the habit of drinking the water of the Broad Street Well. John Snow, Letter to the Editor, 1854.

In the long period between Roman and modern plumbing, the city of York was a study in contrasts, its wondrous churches (York Minster but also the 13th-century All Saints’) soaring over streets clogged with sewage and crowded with tenements. The North Street district was among the city’s dirtiest, its sanitation problems worsened by the Ouse’s frequent floods. To be born there was not the best of starts, but John Snow would, one day, make the most of it. Snow was born on March 15, 1813 and baptized in All Saints’ a few days later. Schooled enough to be noticed as a bright lad, he secured a medical apprenticeship in Newcastle. Along the way, a combination of personal religion and actual experience made him a teetotaler vegetarian who drank (whenever possible) only distilled water. That experience included treating cholera victims in northern coalmining towns, and in due course it brought this poor lad into medical school, in London. He graduated in 1844 and soon became known as a medical innovator, not least in the use (and safety) of anaesthetics, administering chloroform at Queen Victoria’s 8th and 9th deliveries. But he’s most famous today for his work in epidemiology, where his York childhood in was as important as his scientific training. Put at its simplest, Snow “mapped” London’s recurrent outbreaks of cholera, and determined that bad water, tainted with sewage, (not “miasma” or “humours”) was the likeliest cause. The offending water pumps were closed down, but the point was not scientifically proven until after Snow’s death (1858). Today Snow’s insight is widely acknowledged. His memorial plaques (in Broad Street, London and North Street, York) show a public water pump with its handle removed and an annual “Pumphandle Lecture” (endowed by the “John Snow Society”) reminds us that good public health requires public provision, public planning, and public ‘regulations.’ ©

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She disliked public mention of her gifts and whenever possible obtained anonymity. This makes it impossible to do more than mention a few of her many large donations. NY Times, obituary for Caroline Bamberger Fuld, July 19, 1944.

A common feature of immigrants is that when they start up a business, everybody works at it. It saves on labor, puts the kids where they keep out of trouble (sorry, Trump) and helps the business to integrate to its new culture, a critical element in economic success. So it was with Noah’s Ark Ristorante in Des Moines, son Noah doing the front of house when it was just a lunch counter, while, backstage, Mama Lacona cooked Neapolitan and Papa Lacona washed American. Much earlier in Baltimore the immigrant Bambergers set up a dry goods shop, and then (as their children came along) staffed it with six little Bambergers. The fifth among them was Caroline Bamberger, born on March 16, 1864, and when in 1883 father Elkan decided to go fully American by setting up a modern department store, Caroline and her brother Louis moved north to bring Bambergers stores to Philadelphia, Trenton, and Newark. They picked up new partners on the way, and Caroline married one of them (thus keeping it in the family). She was especially involved in marketing and may have overseen the then radical innovation of setting up small branches in wealthy suburban towns, notably Princeton, NJ. They prospered together and in 1900 the brother and sister started to give back, with large gifts to public institutions (they built and stocked the Newark Art Museum) and to Jewish charities. When in 1929 (with impeccable timing) they sold the whole chain to Macy’s, they looked for a place to put quite a bit of money. And that is how we (and “we” soon included yet another immigrant called Albert) got the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. By 1944, when the NY Times mourned Caroline’s death, this gift totaled $15 million (over $200 million in today’s $$). But since Caroline and Louis liked to keep their benefactions secret, including even the biggest one, the Times thought it had been just $5 million. Call it an “alternative fact” of the innocent sort. ©

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People don't slip. Time catches up with them. Nat King Cole.

The recently reported increase in racial incidents in the USA is frightening, and is more chilling when we boomers recall our living memories. Let’s take Nat King Cole, the black crooner of our youths who gave us “Rambling Rose” and “A Blossom Fell” and who jazzed it up a bit with “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer.” We remember also that in his heyday, roughly the last 15 years of his too short life, he lived in an exclusive LA neighborhood with his wife and kids, and was one of the first African-Americans to host a variety show on national (NBC) television, debuting in 1956. Cole’s last performance, a nice turn with Jane Fonda in the faux-western comedy Cat Ballou, hit the cinemas in 1965. For a black man born (as Nathaniel Adams Cole) in Alabama on March 17, 1919, that was progress indeed and in itself a comforting story. But in the light of what’s happened lately, we need to recall another side of the Cole story. That “national” TV show could not find a national advertiser and was sponsored only in the Northeast and on the west coast. Although many headliners, both black and white (e.g. Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine, Tony Bennett), appeared on it for no pay or at industry rates, it had to fail. When the Cole family moved into that LA enclave in 1948, the local Klan greeted them with burning crosses and threatening messages. When he dared to appear live back in Alabama, in 1956, his visit was preceded by a viciously racist newspaper and mailing campaign showing him consorting with white women (for instance labeled “Cole With Your Daughter”) and during his concert he was assaulted on stage. He never appeared in the South again. Stung by racist incidents, inspired by the civil rights movement, Nat King Cole concluded (before his early death) that much of the country was (as he put it) still “afraid of the dark.” Today we must explain to ourselves how in the world that can still be true and do what we can to stop it. ©

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All a poet can do today is warn. From the pencilled foreword to the manuscript of Wilfrid Owen's first volume of published poetry, published in 1920.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was commissioned to dedicate Coventry Cathedral, St. Michael’s, and so it was performed (May 1962) in the shadow of the old St. Michael’s, a gaunt shell architected by the Luftwaffe. It was quickly echoed by other “national” premieres, one virtually simultaneous, in the USA, New Zealand, and Holland for instance. Thus it made quite a splash. When I first heard it (on record) a year or so later I knew that its backbone was formed by nine Wilfrid Owen poems set as tenor or tenor-baritone solos. But I then knew nothing of Owen (and in any case have never been able to follow sung lyrics), so all I could say was that I liked the music. Since then I have learned what the world knew, that Owen was a “War Poet,” his excellent, moving verse immortalized by his death at the Oise on November 4, 1918, just one week before the armistice. So Wilfrid Owen had a short life: born in Oswestry, Shropshire on March 18, 1893 into a respectable lower middle-class family. He failed in his ambition to get to university, but developed a knack for poetry and a deep admiration for the Romantics, notably Keats and Shelley (whose echoes, critics say, are found in Owen’s war poetry). Before the war began, he also developed a sharp sense of the contrasts between the evangelical pieties of his parents and his boss (he worked in a vicarage near Reading) and the grinding poverty of the parishioners. In due course the Great War came. Owen volunteered (for the “Artists’ Rifles”), was commissioned, and with what now seems a terrible inevitability was wounded, treated, and sent back to the front three or four times (on his longest recuperation, May to November 1917 in an Edinburgh sanatorium, he met Siegfried Sassoon). So in retrospect one cannot avoid seeing a deep fatalism in his poems. But along with it is a gemlike moral clarity that perfectly fit Owen’s verse to Britten’s music, at Coventry, in 1962. ©

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No one will remember Adolph Rupp without remembering us. And I guess there is a certain justice in that. Harry Flournoy.

Dyed-in-the-wool fans argue forever about the greatest championship game in “March Madness” history. But all should offer some deference to the NCAA championship game (men’s basketball) on March 19, 1966 at College Park, Maryland: the Texas Western College Miners taking the court against the University of Kentucky Wildcats. Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso) won, 72-65, and it would have been no more remarkable than any other NCAA final but for our country’s difficulties with race and ethnicity, now recurring with racist language emanating from the White House about immigrants, about inner cities, about crime, and about welfare. Back in 1966, for the first time, the NCAA final saw a starting five that was all black (Bobby Joe Hill, David Lattin, Orsten Artis, Willie Worsley, and Harry Flournoy). Facing them was an all white team coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp, who vowed to keep Kentucky basketball lily white. Coming in the decade of the Selma March, the Birmingham bombing, and the March on Washington, this game assumed a symbolic importance denied to most sporting events. Texas Western won, but the seven (all black) El Paso stars who played in the game were castigated then and later by Coach Rupp and novelist James Michener, among others, as “street thugs,” “ragamuffins,” “loose jointed ramblers,” and other “non-racial” epithets, but four of them graduated from college (which is more than can be said of four of Rupp’s five starters) and all seven enjoyed successful business careers after they left UTEP. For a young Iowan who remembered the Jack Trice and Johnny Bright incidents (Trice was a student of my grandfather’s, Bright of my father’s) it was a very satisfying evening. And it integrated southern basketball. In 1972, another all-white Rupp team lost (to the Florida Gators) in the final, and Florida fielded an all-black starting five. ©

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I told Nancy that Gorbachev's Aquarian planet is in such harmony with Ronnie's, you'll see ... They'll share a vision. Joan Quigley.

The dependence of President Reagan on astrology is disputed between his critics (who highlight the issue) and his defenders (who discount or deny it). Whatever, the California heiress and astrologer Joan Quigley went to her grave (in 2014) convinced (with proofs) of her positive influence on the presidential couple. Without deciding the matter, it was an odd belief for those who prefer causes and their effects to be linked in concrete or at least discernible ways. It was not always so, however. A century earlier, when spiritualism was in vogue, Abraham and Mary Lincoln sought help in “reaching” their dead boys from well-known and not-so-well-known mediums, and Mary may (or may not) have been ‘spiritually’ warned about that night at the theatre. Then, spiritualism ridiculed only by a few, practiced by many. The most famous medium of the age was Daniel Dunglas Home, born in Scotland on March 20, 1833 and educated in Connecticut. He was an odd boy who returned to Europe to became an odder adult, and it’s arguable that he was not so much a professional medium as he was a professional guest, enjoying his hosts’ bread and board while he kept them in touch with their dear departeds. And his hosts invited other guests to participate, and so Home’s invitations proliferated. The long list of hosts who benefited (or not) from Home’s nightly ministrations might comfort the Reagans’ defenders, including as it did the Prussian Crown Prince, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Trollope, Tsar Alexander and Napoleon III (with whom he resided for a year). It certainly comforted Home, who lived rather well on it until his death, in France, in 1886. Home was not, however, a hit with Robert Browning, who satirized him as “Mr. Sludge the medium” and Harry Houdini, who (later) attacked him as a not very good parlor trickster. So we’ll leave Home as we leave the Reagans’ astrologers, in the shadows. ©