BOB'S BITS

[Tripps]

I'm quite happy to accept that he is on a higher intellectual plane than me.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Me too.but that doesn't mean I'll be totally uncritical.
I can only apply what intelligence I have available - and I do.

BobBliss.JPG

[Stanley]

Amateur astronomer extraordinaire.

We will not consider the possibility of the beginning of things or attempt to define the totality of space, but we will in imagination clear a certain part of space and then set certain possibilities at work.   Joseph Norman Lockyer, “The History of a Star,” 1889. 
  
In 1889, Einstein’s theory of relativity lay still in the future (1905).  The “Big Bang” was even further distant (1965 et seq)   But astronomers already knew enough (observationally and theoretically) to think that, although the universe might be infinite, it also might (or must) have had a beginning, and that this beginning was probably very distant in time and space.  These were uncomfortable thoughts, as discommoding as those presented in Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (1859).  So Joseph Norman Lockyer took a gentler approach, opened a small window, shed a bit of light on the otherwise imponderable.   He offered a safe space in which one might think about such things without (necessarily) upsetting all one’s apple carts.   Born in Warwickshire on May 17, 1836, Joseph Norman Lockyer would become one of Victorian Britain’s more successful popularizers of science.   Hard science, mostly, but Lockyer also wrote ‘scientifically’ about such things as golf and cricket; and he developed one of the better theories about Stonehenge.  But for him science was the thing: astronomy in particular.  And in astronomy he was an amateur.  With inherited wealth (his father was a pioneer in telegraphy) and two advantageous marriages, not to mention a secure position in the Victorian civil service, he could afford amateurism, and took to it with rare energy.  We know him best as the founder of the scientific periodical Nature, which became under his long leadership (and has remained) an influential public forum for sciences of all sorts.   And Roger Lockyer discovered the element Helium, which came surprisingly late (1868) given Helium’s place (#2) on the periodic table.  On earth Helium is vanishingly rare, though not in the universe, and Lockyer found it by examining the sun’s outer reaches.   He also had a hand in creating the technique of discovery, spectroscopy, in which Helium appears at a particular wavelength.   Lockyer (and his co-discoverer and sometime collaborator Pierre Jansenn) found Helium by observing the sun’s outer perimeter during the eclipse of 1868.  Lockyer named the element after the sun itself: in Greek, as befit someone with a good public school education.  Later, he would organize (and lead) no fewer than eight expeditions to observe solar eclipses, including one to India in 1871.   This expedition was fully reported in the popular press (the Illustrated London News story can be read on line), and it leaves behind a wonderful artifact, now in the National Portrait Gallery.  It is a photograph of Lockyer and his party enjoying, I am quite certain, a tea interval in a cricket match near Mysore.   To me, they all look like amateurs. ©.  

[Stanley]

Ethyl lead and the Friedman Principle

There is one and only one social responsibility in business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.   Milton Friedman.
   
To which Friedman added the rider that the corporation must play by ‘the rules of the game,’ but this provides little comfort.  Tobacco companies knew for years that smoking causes cancer.  General Motors was so embarrassed by CEO Alfred Sloan’s views on car safety (and on Adolf Hitler) that the company burned, shredded, or perhaps just misplaced Sloan’s private papers.   And the rules are such that the only way to get justice done on Purdue Pharma for its predatory profits has been to sue the Sackler family in the civil courts.  All this brings me to the case of Thomas Midgley, Jr.,born on May 18, 1889, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.   Midgeley was perhaps fated to become an industrial entrepreneur and inventor.  His father and a maternal grandfather had waxed rich on their inventiveness, and so young Midgley majored in mechanical engineering.  Afterwards, while Alfred Sloan was welding General Motors together, Thomas Midgley was busily at work (at a GM subsidiary) perfecting a means to make gasoline motors run quietly.   One could, I suppose, have concentrated on better engineering, but cheaper is better, and Midgley worked, instead, on chemical additives to gasoline.   Soon he hit upon a compound of lead, Plumbum, Pb in your periodic table.  It was tetraethyllead.  But people had known for centuries about the poisonous effects of lead, and so  the stuff was christened as “Ethyl.”   In 1923, Midgley won an award from the American Chemical Society for his genius, but had to take a sabbatical because of lead poisoning. So while GM and Dupont worked out new corporate solutions for financing Ethyl ®, and collecting its profits, Midgley worked on reducing Ethyl’s lead content.   This work did not improve his health, and the workforce at the plants producing Ethyl continued to sicken, to go nuts, and to die, but in pursuit of profits GM, Dupont, and Thomas Midgley continued to sell the stuff.  Midgley even used himself as a public guinea pig, bathing in Ethyl and breathing its fumes to show its safety and citing “research” that Ethyl (in small enough bits) could be safe for all of us.   Midgley went on to invent (for Frigidaire, yet another GM subsidiary) the refrigerant we know by its trade name of Freon,  Midgley got another ACS medal and GM added to its shareholders’ dividends, thus conforming to the Friedman principle and meeting its overriding social objective.   And we all know how Freon turned out, too.   For Midgley, it didn’t turn out much better.  Debilitated by his recurring bouts of lead poisoning, he fell prey to polio.   He died in bed, garroted by a pulley system that he had invented for his paralyzed body.   It’s a sad story: a “lead” story so to speak, and one that should inspire us to think very carefully about the rules of the game. ©.    

[Stanley]

Though she might startle at the question ‘what is the price of pigs? she knows what the price should be?’

I am iron now—and my life is altered into one of action, not of sentiment—Ambition is not my idol, but my plaything.   Lady Charlotte Guest, Journal (entry for April 12, 1836). 
  
Though written on the eve of Victoria’s accession, this is not ‘Victorian’ sentiment.   Lady Charlotte Guest was not a conventional Victorian.   Born into the aristrocracy (papa was the 9th earl of Lindsey) on May 19, 1812, she’d already kicked over her traces by mastering seven languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, and then, aged only 21, by marrying into trade.  She wed the Welsh ironmaster John Josiah Guest, and moved to his mansion in South Wales, where the garden gate was also the entry to Guest’s foundry, then one of the world’s biggest.  To be sure, Charlotte would birth ten children in the first thirteen years of her marriage, which was fairly conventional.  But she saw them all (five boys, five girls) through to adulthood, which was unusual.   Odder still, Lady Charlotte gloried in being “a tradeswoman,” and set herself to learn what she could about making iron, not only keeping the books but translating (from the French) a manual on a new sort of blast furnace.  And she made the Guest ironworks into an early version of a utopian company town, with a hospital, a library, and a large school for the children (boys and girls) of the 7,000-strong workforce.   And she mastered Welsh well enough to translate ancient literary texts into English, including several which were hoped to be of Arthurian origin.   She herself doubted this provenance, but did a good enough job to inspire Tennyson’s epic Idylls of the King.  Her work may later have found its way into J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ring saga.  And did Frank Lloyd Wright call his Wisconsin dream palace Taliesen after Lady Charlotte’s translation of that legendary Welsh bard?  Probably not, but all of her accomplishments were unusual for a woman in Victorian Britain, even radical.  Some say that Lady Charlotte’s reforming zeal at the ironworks was inspired by the Chartist movement.   But in other respects . . .   Before and after John Guest’s death (1852) she introduced their children into “Society,” arranging marriages for most of them into the established aristocracy (including the Churchills, the Grosvenors, and the Cornwallises).   As a widow-manager, she cooperated with other ironmasters to break the  strike of 1853: perhaps reluctantly, but then Lady Charlotte was accustomed to command and confident of her good intentions.   Then she married her children’s tutor, Charles Schreiber, fourteen years her junior, and set up shop  (based in London) as a noted traveler, hostess, and collector of domestic fashions.  Her fabrics, her ceramics, even her playing cards and fans now reside in the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum.  But I like to think of her as a convention-flouter, for she flouted conventions.  ©   

[Stanley]

A great 'girl' reporter.

God made man.  Then he said ‘I can do better than that,’ and made woman.  Adela Rogers St. Johns. 
 
Once upon a time, my dad wrote what may have been the shortest reference letter of all time, to an old friend, then the editor of a major midwestern daily.  “If you don’t hire this young woman, you will have only yourself to blame.”  Dad’s student got the job, a rare triumph for a young female reporter in those far off and hard to imagine days.  When I think of great women reporters of dad’s era, some names leap forward, and they were few and brave: Martha Gellhorn and Marguerite Higgins, intrepid war reporters; Ida Wells, breaking down color and gender barriers in her own profession and reporting about them in society at large; Dorothy Thompson, whose interviews so irritated Hitler that she got thrown out of Germany in 1934.   Thompson was called (I think by Eleanor Roosevelt) ‘The First Lady of American Journalism.’   I’m not sure that Thompson ever accepted the accolade, but here’s another woman journalist, who called herself “The World’s Greatest Girl Reporter;’ Adela Rogers St. Johns, born in Los Angeles on May 20, 1894.  She may have learned the arts of self-promotion from her father, the most famous criminal lawyer in a city bursting with crime.   Adela was devoted to her father, the more so when her mother absconded.   Her biography of Earl Rogers was entitled Final Verdict.   From him and his client list she learned much of life, perhaps its seamier side, and from him she got her entrée into journalism, for he was a close friend of William Randolph Hearst.  Hearst, no stranger to self-promotion, gave Adela a reporting job (at the San Francisco Examiner) when she was only 18.   But Adela wasn’t yet the world’s greatest girl reporter, for she took time off to write screenplays for Hollywood silent movies and took a stab at fiction.  Real fiction, that is, and not just journalistic sensationalism.   That was Hearst’s stock-in-trade, and by the 1930s Adela was one of his favorite reporters on scandals (not, probably, any of Hearst’s own) and on spectacular crimes, notably the Lindbergh kidnapping and the trial of its perpetrator.  Adela, who kept her first married name throughout her career, though she didn’t keep husbands at all well, also wrote puff pieces on film stars. for Hearst magazines, here calling herself “The Mother-Confessor of Hollywood.”  Later, she would coyly deny (without actually denying) that one of her four children was fathered by Clark Gable.  Adela Rogers St. Johns, a pro to her finger tips, wrote serious stuff, too, and spent two years teaching journalism (reporting, I suppose) at UCLA.  But my dad never mentioned her, and I can’t say whether, or not, she ever recommended one of her female students as enthusiastically (or as tersely) as he did.  ©

[Stanley]

And its founder, Clara Barton.

In my case, it was a great gift, like St. Paul, I "was born free", and saved the pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt.  Clara Barton, 1905, in a letter explaining her belief in universal salvation.  

May 21, 1881, was the birth-day of the American Red Cross.  Its past is irreproachable enough that it has long been the US’s most admired (some say ‘most loved’) public charity.  Its mission statement offers a reason.  The Red Cross “prevents and alleviates human suffering in the face of emergencies by mobilizing the power of volunteers and the generosity of donors.”  So today’s Red Cross reflects the life of its founder, Clara Barton.  She was an unusual person, and as in that 1905 letter one could say that she was born to it, on Christmas Day 1821, in the Massachusetts village of North Oxford, where her parents were pioneer members of what may have been America’s first Universalist church.  They named their baby Clarissa, after the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748).  Then they set about ensuring that “Clara” would not have to experience Clarissa Harlowe’s harrowing quest for personhood.  Clara Barton’s shyness was a problem at first, but she excelled at the village school, learned nursing the hard way (by seeing her brother through a terrible head injury), and cultivated the  ability to compete in what was a boy’s world.  Determined not to be a burden on her family, she carried her own load as a government clerk in 1850s Washington.  With the outbreak of Civil War, she became America’s Florence Nightingale, a nurse who commanded respect, commandeered supplies, and cared for the wounded whether Union or Confederate.  She saw more battles than most soldiers.  She buried the dead, too, and led efforts to identify the thousands who’d been buried “unknown.”  After the American war she served in European ones, and it was there that she learned of the international Red Cross, based in Switzerland.  Back home she engaged with feminists (including the indomitable St. Louisan Frances Gage) and supported the formerly enslaved (those not “born free”) in their quest for real freedom.  She was an extraordinary figure whose accomplishments (before and after her founding of the American Red Cross) defy summary.   Historians believe that (along the way) she may have had love affairs with men (one with a Union officer, in coastal South Carolina), but Clara Barton’s fulfillment never involved marriage or motherhood.  Her monuments abound, even in Santiago, Cuba.  One of them, Barton Hall at Iowa State University, is now a coed student residence.  When my mother lived there, in the mid-1930s, it was for women only, many majoring in home economics: times change.  But some things endure.  Barton’s monument at Antietam incorporates a cross made of red (well, russet) bricks from her North Oxford home.   ©  

[Stanley]

Once more, into the breach!!

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
>From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .  Henry V, at Agincourt, in the Shakespeare play. 
 
The ‘Old Vic’ Theatre (named for ‘Victoria’, who once, before she became queen, attended a play there) still stands in the untheatrical neighborhood of Lambeth.  It has in its past hosted several important companies, notably the Royal Ballet, but it’s best known for the eponymous ‘Old Vic’ company, which has been there since it was founded (by Lillian Bayliss and John Gielgud) in 1929.  Been there ‘on and off’: the Luftwaffe closed the building down in 1940.  But in 1944, with the tides of war turning, it was decided to bring the Old Vic (company) back to the Old Vic (theatre).  The ‘new’ company was a partnership headed by Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, by then regarded as two of the finest English actors.   Richardson wanted to make it a triumvirate by bringing in John Gielgud, but Gielgud declined.  Bring me in, Gielgud warned, and you’ll be doing nothing but acting as “referee between me and Larry.”  That was sad, and ironic too, for earlier in “Larry’s” career Gielgud had been something of a father figure.  Children often regard father figures more fondly than their ‘real’ fathers, but in Laurence Olivier’s case, it was the other way round.  Olivier, born on May 22, 1907, was sent to drama school by his father when the boy was only 17.   Perhaps that was faute de mieux, but Laurence had already shown his talent at age 10.  And Olivier later credited his father with giving him a sense of stage presence.  His dad was a Church of England cleric of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion, for whom theatricality was central to his priestly functions.  But Laurence didn’t like his father very much, either; and overall it’s hard to dissent from Gielgud’s judgment that Olivier was often too prickly for comfort.  And that’s too bad, really, for Olivier did make himself into a red-hot actor, in film, on stage, and in a staggering variety of roles.  Staunch hero, creepy villain, troubled soul, romantic lover, comic bumbler, aloof aristo: in his prime, Olivier did them all.   Although he didn’t really hit his stride until the 1940s, he was to be regarded as the greatest English actor of his generation, eclipsing even Richardson and Gielgud.   Among his early triumphs was the wartime movie production (1944) of Shakespeare’s Henry V, rewritten to stress both its historicity (as when first performed), and its modern relevance as the Allies were about to breach Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe.’  It's the best propaganda ever, and I still thrill to Olivier’s rendering of Henry’s speeches at the siege of Harfleur and then, on Crispin’s day, at the battle of Agincourt.   ©.     
 

[Stanley]

I have haunted the river every night lately, where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight. It is indeed a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable, and I never tire of it.  Walt Whitman, 1879. 
    
In 1850s Hannibal, young Sam Clemens dreamed of escape (and fame and fortune) as a steamboat captain.  If we are to believe him (it’s not always safe to do so), he mastered the profession and learned to read the Mississippi from its surface texts.  But history gave us “Mark Twain” rather than “Captain Clemens.”  History also gave us “Captain” James Buchanan Eads.  Eads never did captain a paddle wheeler, but his fame (and his honorific “Captain”) rested on his ability to read the Mississippi from the bottom up.   Nor did he learn as an apprentice.  Rather, Eads taught himself.   Today, his main monument spans the great river, the Eads Bridge at St. Louis.   When built, it was an engineering marvel, a double-decked monster made almost entirely of steel and with the world’s longest arches.  It impresses still, now (besides a roadway) carrying Metrolink’s commuter rail across the flood.  But the real miracle lies below, for the bridge’s weight bearing pillars reach way down to bedrock, 100 feet below the Mississippi’s muddy bottom.   James Buchanan Eads, named after his mother’s distant cousin (who would become President James Buchanan) was born in rural Indiana on May 23, 1820.   His ambitious father moved the family to St. Louis, but a series of disasters left James, aged only 13, to support his widowed mother and sisters.  His kindly employer gave him time off to read and study.  He may have read Ben Franklin’s autobiography, for besides learning much of engineering and science young Eads taught himself ambition.  By the early 1850s, he was running a salvage company, diving deep below the river’s roiling surface to retrieve valuable wreckage (and, I suppose, bodies) from those steamboats that had, from faulty boilers or careless captains, sunk to the bottom.   Eads’s first dives were in an inverted wine barrel.  It was dangerous work, but profitable, and besides learning how to surive the pressure problems Eads coped with the river’s currents and eddies.  The Civil War produced yet more wreckage, but also a market for Eads’s ironclad river boats.  It also provided Eads with the contacts he needed to be the engineer chosen to bridge the river, at St. Louis, a seven-year project that ended, with suitable fanfare, on July 4, 1874.  Besides reaching down through the flood to the bedrock, Eads’s construction did not interrupt surface traffic, for he also devised the method, still used today, of building outwards from cantilevered supports.  I cross Eads’s bridge now and again.  It’s not as much fun as rereading Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, but it’s an homage nevertheless.  ©

[Stanley]

"Dr. Blalock, you've done a nice job closing this ductus; why can't you build a ductus?"

Learn to listen with your fingers.   Dr. Helen Taussig.
   
When I began my schooling, in Grundy Center, I was aware that a local girl in my age cohort was a ‘blue baby.’  More than vaguely aware: for my parents’ best friend, locally, was the girl’s doctor, Varina DesMarias, and Varina knew of a revolutionary surgical procedure that might save the girl’s life.  It had been recently (1944) developed at Johns Hopkins University by Dr. Alfred Blalock.  Over the years, I’ve learned more about it.  The procedure is now called the “BTT Shunt” for Blalock and two of his colleagues Vivien Thomas and Helen Taussig.  The belated inclusion of Thomas and Taussig represents two revolutions in American medicine, for Vivien Thomas was a black man, then ‘only’ a technician in Blalock’s lab, and Helen Taussig, MD, was a woman.  In this series I’ve noted Thomas’s rise to recognition and respect.  Today it’s Taussig’s turn.  Helen Brooke Taussig was born in Cambridge, MA, on May 24, 1898.  Her father, F. W.Taussig, came out of St. Louis’s German community to become an eminent Harvard economist.  Her mother was a New England blue blood and a Radcliffe College blue stocking, and it seems that Helen learned from both parents that she could, and should be able to, do whatever she aimed to do.  Early on, she aimed at medicine, and a Harvard MD.  But although Harvard did admit women to medical studies, it would not give them a degree.  So Helen had to go somewhere that “woman doctor” was not an oxymoronic expression, and after some time at Boston University and then a Phi Beta Kappa degree at California-Berkeley, she fetched up at Johns Hopkins.   There she wanted to specialize in internal medicine, but her department already had its token woman, and so she became a pediatrician instead.  This was a common fate for female medical graduates, but Helen Taussig made the most of it.  Her near total deafness gave her a new-ancient teachnique (through her fingers!!) of diagnosing children’s hearts.  To make a long story short, it was Helen Taussig who suggested, to Blalock and his lab tech Thomas, a surgical solution to the blue baby syndrome, and then ran interference for them as they embarked into the then-forbidden field of “open heart” surgery.  Much later, Dr. Taussig got a bit part (played well by Helen Masterson) in the 2004 biopic Something the Lord Made.  But that was the movie that made Vivien Thomas famous.  Taussig, who died in 1986, had gained more recognition earlier as a pioneer in several fields.  Not least, she was a leader in the crusade against the drug Thalidomide and its devastating effect on babies’ bodies.  In 1964, she was the first medical doctor (of any gender or any race) to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   ©

[Stanley]

Southern belle, flapper girl, suffragette.

We should be ashamed to stand on ground won by women in the past without making an effort to honor them by winning a higher and wider field for the future.   Sue Shelton White.  

Back in the early summer of 1920, the fate of the 19thAmendment was by no means a sure thing.  After the battles in Washington had finally produced the draft legislation, the question moved to the 48 state legislatures, requiring the assent of at least 36.   35 states had ratified, but in the South, 8 states voted no, and next up was the Tennessee legislature, where it had been a a struggle even to get the thing on the agenda.   The state senate voted yea, but in the end success depended on a single vote majority in the house, cast (in dramatic circumstances) by a young representative called Harry Burn.  Burn, rather apologetically, said that he was following his mother’s advice: “Hurrah and vote for the suffrage . . . [and] don’t forget to be a good boy.”  So hurrah for Ms. Febb Burn for, on August 18, 1920, Harry’s single vote nudged the thing over the top.  But we owe as much, maybe more, to another Tennessee woman, Sue Shelton White, born in Henderson, TN, on May 25, 1887.  Sue never married, so she had no son to mobilize, but she did much to mobilize others.   The daughter of a lawyer (who was also a Methodist minister), Sue and her sister grew up preparing for careers, both finding work as law secretaries.  In 1907, Sue became court reporter (stenographer) for the state supreme court.  This was no small accomplishment for a country girl.  She’d also been bitten by the equality bug and, to judge by her pictures, bobbed hair and all, had joined the ‘flapper’ generation.  So, early on, Sue joined the Tennessee Women Suffrage Association and was soon its recording secretary.  She played a leading role in an unsuccessful campaign for state and municipal suffrage, and gained national notice too.   Soon Sue joined the more radical National Women’s Party, burned President Woodrow Wilson (in effigy of course, in 1919), and returned to Tennessee intent on ratification.   While Harry Burn read his mother’s letter, Sue White lobbied legislators, even at one point winning the support of the Speaker.  The battle was finally won on August 18, 1920.   Sue went on to lobby, successfully, for laws protecting the property rights of married women, for women to be included in the state’s pension system, and (while she was at it) for public support of the blind.  In 1922, she got a law degree of her very own, serve in the Washington office of Senator Kenneth McKeller (D, TN), and then finished her public career as counsel for FDR's Social Security Administration.  Sue Shelton White died in 1947, but her memory lives on in the annual Sue Shelton White Award, given to a lawyer active in advancing women’s rights in Tennessee. ©    

[Stanley]

The British Housewives' League.

The sturdy independent character of the British Home is being lost in a welter of Control which the State does so badly and which the Mother, given the tools and opportunity, does so well.   Mrs. Irene Lovelock, 1946.  

Britain’s Labour government, 1945-1951, came under much criticism for continuing and in some ways intensifying wartime rationing.  Given Britain’s sufferings (not only in WWII itself, but also in the Great Depression) some sort of financial control was advisable.  Labour’s ambitions (nationalization, public welfare, socialized medicine) made rationing essential.  But when rationing came right down to chops, bangers, and spuds, it spawned resistance.  Chops were especially hard to buy, so was sugar, and so the British housewife (whose work was never done) had also to cope with the indignities of ration books.  This became stock-in-trade for comedians, offering up jokes and tropes that persisted far into the postwar era, for instance in the small sins of Lance Corporal Jack Jones in the BBC sitcom Dad’s Army.  He was a stalwart in the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, but also the town’s sole butcher, and not above slipping a bit of liver to a buxom hausfrau  or to his commanding officer.  But besides comedy there was politics, and the rationing system proved an easy target for those who believed (or claimed) that a free market would bring roast beef and Yorkshire pudding back to Britain’s Sunday lunch.  Besides Winston Churchill (who seems not to have wanted for beef or brandy) and his Conservative Party, there was the British Housewives’ League (BHL) and its indomitable president (and founder), Irene Lovelock, born in London on May 26, 1896.   Irene claimed not to be political.  She was just a housewife, after all, and resolute in her belief that housewives-in-general were the best providers of the nation’s diet. In retrospect, Lovelock looks like a Margaret Thatcher figure.  Of course Thatcher’s father was a grocer while Irene’s was an ironmonger, and while Thatcher went to Oxford and married an oil tycoon, Irene went to a “School for Young Ladies” and married a Church of England vicar, but they were as one in their belief that the household’s business was exactly like the nation’s economy, and that both were best served by a freely competitive market, and assuredly not by government rationing.  Lovelock’s BHL, founded in late 1945, soon claimed 70,000 members.  But they were mostly middle and upper class women who could have afforded to buy more chops (and cutlets) if only rationing would stop.  Later studies have shown that the British people, en masse, ate well during rationing: they balanced their diets, consumed vegetables-in-season and never overindulged in fatty meats or French brandies—nor did they chew Cuban cigars.  How unlike they were to Winston Churchill, leader of the loyal opposition. © 

[Stanley]

Awarded the Navy Cross, May 27, 1942.

For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety, and later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.   Navy Cross Citation for Messman 2nd Class Dorie Miller. 
  
As it’s Memorial Day, let’s remember Dorie Miller, Mess Attendant 2nd Class, USN, who on May 27, 1942, was awarded the Navy Cross by Admiral Chester Nimitz.  The award was for Miller’s exploits aboard the USS West Virginia during the attack of December 7, 1941.  As the attack began, Miller came up the Mess to receive orders.  After carrying his wounded captain, Mervyn Brennion, down from the bridge Miller tended other wounded, and again reported for duty at the ship’s gathering point.  Miller then helped load and activate the ship’s anti-aircraft batteries, and manned one of them.  In the process, he brought down at least one enemy airplane before returning again to help wounded crewmen off the ship.  Miller was a big man, 6’3”, and easily noticed.  So, on January 1, 1941, only three weeks after Pearl, he was among those recommended for commendation.  Except that Dorie Miller wasn’t named.  He was, instead, an “unidentified Negro.”  There followed a campaign to name him, and more.   The NAACP recommended him for the Distinguished Service Cross, then the Navy’s second-highest honor.   Senator James Mead (D, NY) and Congressman John Dingell (D, MI) sponsored a bill recommending Dorie Miller for the Medal of Honor.   But Navy Secretary Frank Knox didn’t think anyone so black should be so honored.   But some of Miller’s crewmates (who continued to insist that he’d shot down more than one plane) helped raise a stink, and it was settled that Messman 2nd Class Dorie Miller would get the Navy Cross.  That was OK with Chester Nimitz, and the May 27 ceremony took place on the Admiral’s flagship.  Nimitz’s comments were warm and sincere, and well received, but in retrospect they seem patronizing.  As for Miller, he was promoted and assigned to a different Mess in a different ship, for stewards’ duties were the only ones open to men of color in that day’s navy.  Miller later died in battle in the western Pacific, his new ship torpedoed.  Captain Brennion, who’d done a good deal more than just bleed to death, got a Medal of Honor.  Messman Miller was never so honored, not even posthumously.  But since 1970 there’s always been a Navy ship named after him, and in 2030 a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Doris Miller, will be launched.  Miller, born in Waco, TX, on October, 1919, was expected to be a girl.  He wasn’t, and “Dorie” may have been a transcription error.  Dorie, or Doris, was also a good deal taller and much blacker than Chester Nimitz, after whom we’ve named a whole class of aircraft carriers.   Happy Memorial Day!!!   ©

[Stanley]

"So it goes."

drachma: noun.  Before the Euro (€), the ‘drachma’ was the basic unit of modern Greek currency.   The word itself is of very ancient (1st millennium, BCE) Cretan origin, a verb meaning ‘to grasp’ or, as a noun, ‘handful.’  
 
Because other species (e.g. ravens and chimpanzees) are known to trade one thing for another, we assume that humans have been doing so for a very long time.  But the use of a symbolic currency (as it were, a mere handful) to make large purchases one after the other is of more modern origin, originating perhaps in pharaonic Egypt or even in Ur, the origin city of Mesopotamia.  There payments were made (or values calculated) with metal ingots, probably beginning with copper.   But coinage as such awaited the reigns of Alyattes and his son Croesus in the kingdom of Lydia (in what is today western Turkey).   Alyattes used an alloy containing silver, gold, and a few other metals.  Croesus used purified gold.   Alyattes reigned long and, probably, well, for 57 years, until about 560 BCE.   Croesus proved too rich for his own good: think “as rich as Croesus”.  He lasted only 14 years before falling prey to the great Persian warlord Cyrus in 546 BCE, who continued the practice of gold coinage, but changed the design as a mark of his sovereignty.  Of course neither Alyattes, Croesus, nor Cyrus dated their coins, or their reigns, as being ‘before’ anything.  But we know their dates, on our own time scale, because something happened during Alyattes’s lordship that we can date with near precision.  It was the great solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BCE.  We know the day (even the likely hour) because of the miracles of modern astronomy and because of a great battle that took place during the eclipse (the battle was called “Battle of the Eclipse”) between the armies of Lydia (King Alyattes) and Medea (King Cyaxares).  As was usual, there was great slaughter, including Cyaxares himself, but despite his death it was regarded as a draw.  The armies withdrew from the field, Cyaxares received a ceremonial burial and was succeeded by his son Astyages, who would lose his kingdom and his life to the aforesaid Cyrus.  Other than the invention of coinage, it’s difficult to see much of an improving trend amongst all this carnage.   And before we congratulate ourselves on the accuracy of our modern astronomy, we might reflect that the eclipse of May 28, 485 BCE had been predicted by the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus. According to Herodotus, writing about a century later, the battle was declared drawn because of the eclipse.  According to Isaac Asimov, writing well after the fact, the whole affair marked “the birth of science.”  The novelist Kurt Vonnegut offers us a different judgment: “so it goes.”  ©.  

[Stanley]

Science and hype.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.   Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968).

“Climate change denialism” is an awkward expression and a dangerous (possibly fatal) tendency.  Its persistence owes to a number of factors. Oil companies don’t like to think about global warming for various reasons, but among them greed ranks high.  Or perhaps it’s merely stinginess.  Serious solutions to global warming will cost money, require substantial redistribution of resources, and force increases in the power of what some call the “deep state” (otherwise known as “government”).  But whatever their motives, “deniers” have also been able to cite error, bad science, and hyperbole.   We’ve had prophets of doom for a long time, and some doomsayers have put their case recklessly.   Take, for instance, the 1968 book The Population Bomb. The title was alarming enough.  Worse, the book told us that the bomb had already exploded.   Although the book was a collaboration between Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne, the publishers credited Paul alone.  The publishers’ reasons now seem quaint, even objectionable, but it was Paul who became the public ‘face’ of the book.   Paul Ralph Ehrlich was born in Philadelphia on May 29, 1932.   He was not related to the German immunologist Paul Ehrlich, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1908 (among other things, that Ehrlich devised a treatment for syphilis).  Our Ehrlich’s father was a shirt salesman.   His mother taught classics in high school.   But Paul’s interests tended towards science, and his first degree (at Penn, in 1953) was in zoology.   At Kansas, where he met and married Anne, he specialized in entomology (Lepidoptera) , and earned his PhD in 1957.   He then took an appointment at Stanford, where he became an exceptionally popular lecturer, not only in the classroom but also on the alumni circuit, where he developed a reputation in Anne’s field (population biology) and nurtured a deep pessimism about the pressure of population (human population) on resources.   He was by no means the first to do so, but he was one of the most alarmist of all our doomsayers.   The book didn’t sell well at first, but took off in 1970 after he appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show.   So there was always an element of ‘hype’ here, and that’s unfortunate because “science,” almost by definition, doesn’t do ‘hype’ very well.   Worse, Ehrlich continued to advertise his predictions, and over the years many of them have been proved wrong.  Dead wrong, some of them, especially those given a time frame in The Population Bomb.  Ehrlich has been called to account for that, and often by people who take undue enjoyment in finding fault with “science.”   In public, and in many later books and articles, Ehrlich (and Anne, too) have conceded their errors of prediction and overstatement, but they’ve been adamant in defending the terrible logic of The Population Bomb.   They’ve defended their decision(s) to keep pushing the issues raised in 1968.  Our earth is not an infinite resource.   On the whole, caution (and science is by its nature cautious) says only that Ehrlich has been wrong “so far.”   But how much farther can the earth be pushed?   In the world’s richest countries, and for its richest classes, this is a particularly urgent question.   Those who are best at fattening themselves are also the world’s greediest users of energy.  ©

[Stanley]

Women in church.

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.    I Corinthians, 14:34-35 (KJV). 
   
Early Methodists were moved by the Spirit, but reacted (excuse the pun) more methodically than previous generations of radical dissenters.   A century before, Quakers had kicked over almost all their traces, addressing everyone (even, in one famous case, King Charles II) by the intimate pronouns ‘thee’ and ‘thou’.   And since the first Quakers would have no preachers per se, no “hirelings of Christ,” any Quaker so moved could speak (prophesy, preach) and be heard.   No one knows today how many Quaker women actually did prophesy in public, but enough of them to cause great consternation, even in Massachusetts, where they caused such horror that one of them, Mary Dyer, was hanged by the neck until dead.   John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, hung back from such a radical notion.   He took seriously Paul’s advice to the church at Corinth, for it was biblical; but also Wesley was anxious not to cause schism in the established church, the very episcopal Church of England.   And so, at first, Wesley disapproved of women being so much taken by the spirit as to preach, in public, to mixed assemblies.  But he changed his mind.  Wesley began in the 1770s to license women preachers, and in 1784 he even removed the word “obey” from the marriage rite he sent to the new “Methodist” churches of the new USA.   But it remained a difficult issue for many of the faithful, as can be seen in the preaching career of Mary Tooth, born in Mosely, Worcestershire, on May 30, 1778.   She was moved to preach (and write, and teach) by the strength of her own conversion, by the pious example of her grandmother, and by the saintly success of one of Wesley’s “licensed” women preachers, Mrs. Mary Fletcher.   But to preach on her own to her own congregation was too radical for Mary Tooth.   Partly it was a matter of temperament.    Partly it was because Mary’s  Tooth’s spiritual coming of age coincided with the 1803 decision of the Methodist Conference to draw back from Wesley’s radical position and to prohibit women preachers.   So for most of her adult life Tooth occupied a no woman’s land, perpetuating Mrs. Fletcher’s legacy while restricting herself to spiritual instruction in small groups, mainly women and children, and within the parish of the Church of England, even within the parish church itself.   After all, Mary Tooth had been born in the shadow of St. Mary’s, Moseley, and there she stayed, until ill health forced her to teach, and preach, in her own home.  At her death (1843), Mary Tooth was mourned as a pioneer Methodist, and a productive one, but of a very peculiar sort.    Whether St. Paul would have approved, heaven knows.  © 

[Stanley]

And she couldn't vote.

Stand by your man.  Tammy Wynette, 1968.

In 1968, this country and western song sped to the top of the charts, where it coexisted—uncomfortably?—with several songs by Bob Dylan.   In itself, standing by your man can be an overrated virtue.   It didn’t do much for Hillary Clinton, and goodness knows what it might do for Melania Trump.   And there’s a sting in the tail of the lyric’s first verse: “’cause, after all, he’s just a man.”  But if you believe that standing by your man no matter what can be made virtuous, then Jessie Benton Frémont is the woman for you.  Born on May 31, 1824, Jessie had two men in her life, and she stood by them both.   They were her father, Senator Thomas Hart (“Old Bullion”) Benton, and her husband, General John C. Frémont.   Both of them, just men, had their flaws.   One of the senator’s was that he had wanted, expected, a son, and had already decided to name the boy Jesse, after Old Bullion’s own dad.   When the baby turned out female, Benton added the “i” to make it OK.   Then he raised his daughter in the manly arts of being a senator in the world’s greatest republic.   She not only learned to ride and shoot, but also took on the classics, Latin and Greek, and proved even more at home in the art of politics.   The smoke-filled room became Jessie’s best setting as she helped dad wheel and deal his way through Washington.   Then, at only 17, her willful side came out when she eloped with a man her father disliked, a young army officer of dubious reputation, then a mere lieutenant, John C. Frémont.  Jessie would spend much of her life making, and defending, his reputation.   Frémont, a self-made hero of the Mexican-American War, became (1856) the very first presidential nominee of the nascent Republic Party, a staunch free-soiler opposed to any extension of slavery into the territories.  He was also, coincidentally I insist, a notorious womanizer.   So in the troubled winter of 1860-61, while General Frémont was in Europe harvesting money (to invest in California) and women (apparently for personal reasons), Jessie Benton was at the couple’s home in San Francisco.   There she organized an odd group of men, including a very young Bret Harte and a very tubercular Unitarian minister, into a ginger group whose purpose was to keep California free (non-slave) and to keep it in the American Union.   Her story is marvelously told in Adam Goodheart’s 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York, 2011).   It should be required reading in this troubled election year.   Jessie stood by her man (or, you could say, her men).   California stayed blue.   And President Abraham Lincoln would find many reasons to say, to Jessie Benton Frémont, “You are quite a female politician.”   Indeed she was.   ©.    

[Stanley]

A Case of Conscience

The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny – Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.  Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), June 1, 1950.   

Thus Ms. Smith, in her ‘Declaration of Conscience’ speech, attacking her Republican colleague Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.   I’ve always, absent-mindedly, placed her speech later, as a preface to the Senate’s 1954 vote of censure against McCarthy.   But Ms. Smith didn’t wait.   She spoke in 1950, in response to McCarthy’s notorious speech in West Virginia, where he claimed to have a list of ‘card-carrying’ Communists (like Spiro Agnew after him, Joe was no stranger to alliteration) and their hangers-on then serving in the State Department.   He claimed that there were 205, but later fudged the numbers.  “Tail-Gunner” Joe was careless with his facts and worse with his logic.   But he became a force in the Republican Party, hungry for office after two decades in the wilderness and eager to roll back both FDR’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal.   Senator Smith might well have been one of them, for she was no friend of Social Security.   But whatever her politics, Ms. Smith had standards, and Joe McCarthy fell short on standards.   Hers was a good speech, and she was a woman of courage.   At the time of her speech, she was the Senate’s only woman, and had there been more men in the Senate possessed of backbone, “McCarthyism” might have died at birth (the word itself was coined only that summer).   Jellied backbones aside, too many politicians (of both parties) were already making too much hay out of finding too many Reds under all our Beds.   In the end, only six Senators signed on to Ms. Smith’s speech, all Republicans.   Joe McCarthy, no wordsmith, didn’t think of the acronym RINO. Instead he mocked “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs” and went on to ride roughshod over them all until, drunken, discredited, and mired in debt, he was censured by the whole Senate in 1954.   Of course Senator Smith was among the 67 to vote for censure.   Another ‘yea’ came from Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas.   There were 22 nays.   Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) courageously did not vote.  His dad, another ‘Joe’, was a McCarthy supporter.   There were other connections.  One of Joe McCarthy’s original backers was a Wisconsin lawyer named Urban Van Susteren, about whose daughter, Greta, you may have heard.   And there was McCarthy’s legal counsel Roy Cohn, who later taught young Don Trump all he needed to know about American jurisprudence.   Before he was disbarred, Cohn represented several Mafia Dons and, oddly, Francis Spellman, the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York.   None were admirers of Margaret Chase Smith.  I like her sense of honor, and her sense of humor.   We could use both.  ©

[Stanley]

You pays your ticket and you gets your choice.

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.   The Rev’d Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking at the National Cathedral, March 1968.  
 
Thus MLK echoed the words of the Rev’d Theodore Parker.  Most say that King improved on Parker’s sermon, and I agree, but King spoke in a different time and out of a different theology.   In 1852, in Boston, Parker could not be so certain.  The ‘Slave Power’ was then so entrenched that he could not predict when the “arc of the moral universe” would bend towards justice.   He could only see a “little ways” and “divine” that the arc would, one day, bend towards justice.   It would indeed take many small steps, for instance while, during the early 20th century, the US Supreme Court dismantled the system that had, in law, allowed governments (and school boards, and restaurants, and even cemeteries) to replace outright racial slavery with de jure racial segregation.   Meanwhile, American apartheid imposed daily humiliations, often made more painful by their pettiness, on millions of citizens.   This was made very clear when, on June 2, 1950, the Court decided (unanimously) the case of Henderson v. US  by prohibiting racial segregation in railway dining cars.    Sounds a small matter, doesn’t it?   But that’s precisely the point.   For one thing, it took Mr. Elmer W. Henderson eight years to win his case, for it was 1942 when he was denied entry to a Southern Railway dining car en route from Washington to Birmingham.   Along his legal way, he’d lost every time, first before the US Interstate Commerce Commission.   The justices traced that long history, and added precise descriptions of the actual practice of ensuring “Separate But Equal” treatment on railway dining cars.  This included two tables (those nearest the kitchen!!) set aside for passengers of color.   When actually occupied by black diners, a curtain was drawn between those two tables and the other ten.   When no black diners presented, the black tables could be taken by white diners (and the curtains removed).  If the black tables were occupied by even one white eater, then no black person could dine.   This is what happened to Mr. Henderson, a government employee traveling on official business and with a first-class ticket but who was declined entry three times (the white diner at the black tables ate slowly?).   But in 1950 the court was not yet ready to overturn the ‘separate but equal’ precedent set in Plessy v Ferguson (1896).   Instead, the absurdity that had humiliated Mr. Henderson was found to be a violation of his rights not as a person (of color) but as an “individual” who had bought the correct ticket and who, by that token, was entitled to this service.   In 1954, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the court would gird its loins and rule that “separate” was inherently “unequal”.   As, indeed, it was.   And in 1968, Martin Luther King could be more optimistic than Theodore Parker about the moral arc of the universe. ©. 

[Stanley]

Beauty and brains.

La comtesse de Gramonte avait l'air d'une reine .    Attributed to Louis XIV of France.   
 
To be one of the most beautiful young women at the licentious court of King Charles II was not necessarily the kindest of fates, but Elizabeth Hamilton made the most of it.   ‘La Belle Hamilton,’ as Elizabeth was known at the English court, lived to a good old age for her time, and when she died  (probably aged 67, on June 3, 1708) she was mourned as a model of piety and prayer, the mother of an abbess and a woman who, for nearly three decades, had been under the spiritual guidance of Archbishop François Fenélon.  But all this was at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, and how she got there is a story.   King Louis mourned her as a woman who had the air of a queen, though really she was a commoner, a younger daughter of a cadet branch of the Butler family.   But her uncle James was Duke of Ormonde, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the Restoration, and this connection alone (to say nothing of her wit and beauty) made her eligible for courtier duty.   As far as history is concerned, she had also the good fortune to have a brother, Anthony, who was one of the most gifted memoirists of the 17th century.   One of his stories about her is quite funny, the one about how she married Philibert, Comte de Gramonte, in 1664.  Philibert wasn’t a great catch, but she made a man of him, or at least a diplomat, and when he died in 1707 she fell victim to a broken heart.   It seems likely that she was, of the two, the real diplomat. From the late 1660s she was a principal go-between in the complicated dealings between Louis XIV, Charles II, and Charles’s younger brother James, whose brief reign ended with England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.   La Belle Hamilton (aka the Comtesse de Gramonte, fluent in French, loved at Versailles and admired at Westminster, and well able to keep any secret that needed keeping, played a role in the infamous ‘secret’ Treaty of Dover, in arranging Louis’s subsidies to the impecunious Charles II, and in encouraging King James’s failed attempts to make England Catholic again.   After James fled Britain he set up a court-in-exile at St. Germaine-en-Laye, near enough to Versailles to allow Elizabeth access to both the real king of France and the would-be King of England.   A woman, she could not attend King James on his invasion of Ireland, but her brothers both did, and her brother Anthony survived tell her tale.   That she was an accomplished person we cannot doubt.   And she was beautiful.  Whether, on top of all that, she really deserved to be pictured as that most virtuous of virgins, St. Catherine (as in her 1663 court portrait by Sir Peter Lely), is a question that is unanswered—and best left so: “diplomatically,” one might say.   © 

[Stanley]

What's in a name?

Live for Service.   Official motto of Mississippi Valley State University.

When on June 4, 1951, Mississippi Valley State University held its first commencement ceremony, the institution was called the “Mississippi Vocational College.”   The legislation that established the college was passed in 1946, when Mississippi’s more progressive (or less reactionary) leaders feared that the state was not maintaining the “separate but equal” standards set by the US Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.   But since 1917, and with increasing frequency, the court had found chinks in the segregationist armor.   Notably, “separate” provisions for African-Americans wishing to qualify as lawyers or medical doctors had been found to be, in actual fact, unequal.   There was a fear that Mississippi’s “separated” institutions could not pass that exam.   But any legislation establishing equal but separate colleges had to win the support of white nationalists, including the long-time Speaker of the House Walter Sillers, a planter-lawyer-businessman (incidentally, one of the richest men ever to serve in the state legislature).   Safety required it to be called a ‘vocational’ college.   Then it took years to find a place that would have it, for what red-blooded Mississippi city would want a black college on its doorstep?   The site finally selected was on an exhausted cotton patch in an unincorporated area of Lenore County, in the Delta, just outside the city limits of Itta Bena (Choctaw for ‘dwelling in the woods’).   But the underlying objective was “separate,” not “equal.”   The college was so woefully underfunded that it took 14 years to gain regional accreditation as a degree-granting institution, another ten years before it could call itself what, from the first, it had wanted to be, Mississippi Valley State University.   MVSU is, in fact, the youngest of the state-funded “HBCUs,” and in the end it didn’t meet the goal of keeping black people from diluting the lily whiteness of “Ole Miss,” the flagship University of Mississippi at Oxford.   That was the task of James Meredith, in 1962, and he would bear the scars to prove it.   And he needed a detachment of federal marshals to protect him from racist slings and arrows.   Meanwhile, back at its dwelling in the woods, MVSU continued to serve its student body with new degree programs, graduate ones included.    Much of the marginal funding for such innovations came from northern philanthropy, notably the Rosenwald Fund, but it’s worth noting that MVSU’s fine arts building still bears the name of the legislator who would let the college happen if only it could be kept safely unequal.    I would call the “Sillers Fine Arts Building” a good target for a politically corrected rechristening.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Hop-Along Cassidy, Western Hero.

I made over 40 westerns.   I used to lie awake nights trying to think of new ways of getting on and off a horse.   William Wyler.  
 
Given the uses made of the ‘western’ image by advertisers (‘Marlboro Man’) and politicians (too many), I view ‘adult western’ as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.    But before its “adult” phase, the western genre seemed like life itself, or like life as we kids wanted to live it.  Of course we had our favorite heroes.  Mine was Gene Autry, who looked like a real cowboy and whose chestnut horse, Champion, was smart and beautiful.  Girls  preferred Roy Rogers.  He rode a palomino but better yet his sidekick was Dale Evans, a girl herself and with a girl horse called Buttermilk.    And it was well-known that Roy and Dale, man and wife, shared a wholesome off-screen life on their real California ranch.  But there were many favorites.   One who came near the bottom of most lists was Hopalong Cassidy.   Perhaps we saw too much of him, not only on TV but in Saturday matinee features at the Varsity Theater.   He wore black cowboy clothes, too, the usual garb of western villains.   His horse had a funny name, ‘Topper,’ and was too elaborately saddled and bridled for real cowpunching.   Cassidy also lacked a regular sidekick unless we count the very irregular “Windy” Halliday, too windy for words.   Anyway, Hopalong wasn’t really Hopalong.   He was William Boyd, born in Ohio on June 5, 1895, and under that black hat his hair was already white.    What we didn’t know, but perhaps suspected, is that by the time we watched his western films and tv serials he’d already had a long film career and not as a western hero.   Rather he was out of Cecil B. DeMille’s stable, with the dark good looks that did well for matinee idols in 1920s silents then in 1930s costumeries.   Boyd became Hopalong Cassidy almost on a fluke, when his earlier persona was floundering and he was no longer a DeMille delight.   He was second choice to play the hero in Hop-Along [sic] Cassidy , a 1935 vehicle that made a dissolute pulp fiction hero into a paragon of many virtues who didn’t drink (except sarsaparilla), smoke, or for that matter punch cows.   He just searched out villains.  It went pretty well, for more than fifty (!!)  Hopalong films, and when it flagged in the theaters Boyd bought the rights to it, sold edited versions of the films to the new TV networks, and crafted a half-hour TV serial to compete with Roy, Gene, and the rest.   Boyd’s second wife bought and named Topper (after a classic comic film) in 1937.   Hopalong and Topper became fixtures at classic parades (e.g. at the Rose Bowl) until Topper finally perished in 1959.   The horse was buried, whole, not at a ranch but at a pet cemetery in Hollywood.   Boyd, who suffered from a life-long heart condition, retired to Palm Desert, not a ranch, to count his cash.  ©.  

[Stanley]

Delta blues.

The great events are babies, for each child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged with humanity.    Marian Wright Edelman.  
 
In 1947, my parents left me with a local child-sitter to visit an old friend (Iowa State College and the 104th Division) at his plantation in Mississippi’s Delta region.  But their joyful reunion turned nasty (and short) when my mother protested at the old friend’s treatment of plantation workers and their families, people kept poor by sharecropping debts and then blamed for their poverty.   Two decades later, in 1967, a Senate subcommittee visited the Delta and came to a similar conclusion.  The story of their tour has been told many times, and should be revisited by every American citizen, for statistics tell us that in today’s Delta life remains unduly short and death comes unduly early in what is supposed to be ‘the richest country on earth.’   In the end, the committee’s recommendations got lost in political and personal infighting, not least between President Lyndon Johnson and Senator Robert Kennedy.  But one good thing did come out of it all, the marriage between one of Kennedy’s aides, Peter Edelman, and the Mississippi lawyer Marian Wright.   Later that same year, Edelman and Wright became only the third “interracial” couple to marry (legally) in the state of Virginia.   They are still married and still, I hope, alive and well on what is Marion Wright Edelman’s 85th birthday, for she was born on June 6, 1939, in Bennettsville, SC.   Born black, one needs to add, for her father was a Baptist minister in Bennettsville.   Marian wasn’t rich enough to go to college wherever she wanted, but she was smart enough, and she got a nice scholarship to Spelman in Atlanta.   She excelled there, then won her law degree from Yale in 1963.   In 1964, as a newly-fledged legal eagle, young, black, and female, Marian Wright returned to the South to practice law in, of all places, the Delta.   She was, in fact, the state’s first black female lawyer.   And she threw herself into the project of making life livable for others, representing them in court, helping them qualify for the state’s restrictive welfare benefits, and registering them to vote.   This didn’t make her popular with local power brokers, but it made her the natural person for Peter Edelman to contact in arranging the subcommittee’s investigations.   As well as parenting three interesting sons, Peter and Marian went on to fulfilling careers, he as a professor at Georgetown law.   Marian Wright Edelman became famous as an advocate for children, especially poor children, at home and abroad.   Her career provides some context and meaning for my parents’ unhappy trip to the Delta in the immediate post war years.   But it was a trip I didn’t hear about until they returned to the Delta, in 1989, for a much-delayed reunion.  And that’s another story.  ©.  

[Stanley]

The view from the corner apartment.

Living in the city, I wrote differently than I would have if I had been raised in Topeka, KS ... I am an organic Chicagoan.    Gwendolyn Brooks, 1994.  
 
When Gwendolyn Brooks was a girl just learning how to make poetry, she lived in a second-story apartment, above a busy intersection in South Chicago.   Right on the corner, she could look up one street, and then look down the other.   Had her parents stayed in Topeka, where Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, she wouldn’t have had such a viewpoint, but life still might have had its excitements.   Her mother had taught in the segregated school that would later be cited as unequal in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954).   Her dad had wanted to be a medical doctor but ended up a well-schooled janitor.   And family tradition held that a grandpa had been a particularly rebellious person who’d fought for the Union army, and freedom, in the Civil War.   So while, in Chicago, Gwendolyn could (and did) attend integrated schools (Hyde Park and Englewood) she also attended all-black ones.   This gave her another of her corner-apartment perspectives and, looking up one side and down the other, she became a remarkably even-handed observer of America’s ‘race problem.’   Brooks began early to put her views into verse.   Her first published poem came out in 1930, when she was just 13, and within four years she was a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender’s poetry corner, “Lights and Shadows.”   More than that, her verse was noticed by several of her heroes, not least Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.  Encouraged, Ms. Brooks thought she might become a real poet.   Ever the realist, she decided also to seek a good-paying day job as a secretary, so her schooling ended (as a student, anyway) with a typist’s certificate from a vocational college.   And she continued to write poems.   Her work attracted further notice, generally favorable, including the telling comment from Paul Engle, the founder of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that Gwendolyn Brooks was no more a ‘black’ poet than Robert Frost, say, was a ‘white’ poet.   So Brooks was still occupying that corner apartment, and it was where she stayed, really, all her life.   Of course she wrote about racism and its injuries (intended and otherwise).   These were the realities of her life.  But she had no time, either, for some black responses.   Some of her poems about street gangs, pool hall heroes, and their hapless, victimized girlfriends were knowledgeable, and (arguably) sympathetic, but not forgiving.   Her work kept accumulating praise and rewards, as it were from both sides of the street, and in 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks was the first person of African descent to win a literary Pulitzer for her poetic narrative Annie Allen, the story of a black girl whose disillusioning life impelled her to heroism.   Not unlike the author.   ©.  

[Tripps]

Living in the city, I wrote differently than I would have if I had been raised in Topeka, KS

I've had a "thing" about this for a while now. I've seen it rather pompously described as "psychogeography".
I think about it when I see the thousands of new properties being built at the moment around Cambridge. They are ugly and many have flat roofs. From a distance it resembles Cairo.

I think the environment must inevitably eventually have an effect on the mental health of the residents, and we are heading for problems. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

cambridge.jpg

I thought this song was from Pete Seeger, but it was written by one Malvina Reynolds. Quite poetic that the 'ticky tacky boxes' are proudly being built in Cambridge. Did the architect have good sense of humour - and irony?

Isn't the Interwebthingy wonderful?. . . .

[Stanley]

I believe you are right David to suspect that our built environment influences our development.



When Susi was driving me up the Camino Reale on my first visit to California she pointed out this development on the hillside and told me it was the houses built of Ticky Tacky in the song.