BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

WATERS

I am somebody because God don’t make no junk. Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, 1951.

Ethel Waters’s autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, was first published in 1951. In retrospect, one might say it was a little before its time, for the modern Civil Rights movement was just getting underway, and the legal and extralegal structures of American apartheid were still pretty much intact—and not only in the southern states. But in 1951 Ethel Waters had already experienced quite enough of it. She was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 1896. Being born black wasn’t a particularly good start in 1896, and in her case less so. Her black mother Louise Anderson, a teenager, had been raped by an ‘almost white’ middle class pianist, John Wesley Waters, so baby Ethel was not a particularly welcome arrival. Ethel’s mother soon married, and Ethel was left in the care of her Anderson relations, notably her grandmother, Sally. It was a tough childhood. Ethel began to negotiate her way out of it by helping grandma Sally clean houses, then graduated to singing and dancing for a meager living. That was in a Baltimore night club, then came a few years in the lower reaches of the vaudeville circuit: Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta and places between. She fetched up in Harlem in 1920 aged 22, with a hard manner and a wonderful voice. Both helped her to become a star singer in night clubs, on disk (Black Star first, then Columbia), and (come the talkies) on short filler films. In some circumstances Ethel Waters could pass as white (it was her facial features, she later said), but she chose her blacker skin; and it was as a black artist that she made the big time, not just records but on film, and with a couple of Academy Award nominations (1943, for a song, and 1949, as a supporting actress). But throughout, there was a chip on Ethel’s shoulder, and it had to do with race, color, segregation. Elia Kazan, who directed her in that 1949 film, later recalled her “truly odd combination of old-time religiosity and free-flowing hatred.” You get the religiosity in the old (1905) hymn that she recorded and then used as the title of her autobiography. And some of the hatred comes through in the book itself. I knew none of this, of course, when I first saw her—several times—on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night TV show. Nor did I know that Sullivan faced much criticism from CBS head office (and some southern “blackouts”) for featuring black performers and (apparently worse) for daring to embrace Waters on camera. But that is a different story. It’s also a different story that Ethel Waters found some relief from the tensions of her life by embracing a different shade of religion. In 1957, she became one of televangelist Billy Graham’s most famous converts. I think that was ‘out of character’ for her. But then I grew up in a sheltered household. ©.

[Tripps]

As movingly, (a bit OTT if truth be told), performed by Lonnie Donegan in 1962.

[Stanley]

FIREWORKS

A little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. The dog Toto, in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900).

‘Toto’ became a cairn terrier in the 1939 movie, and no cairn terrier would stand for being described as cutely accoutered with a “funny, wee nose.” The moniker ‘Toto’ is said to come from an Indiana town where Baum’s family owned a lakeside cabin, and might have derived from a local Native American word. But what about an Italian origin? I’m thinking of Antonio Toto, born in Florence, Italy, sometime in 1499 and who died on or shortly before November 1, 1554, probably in London, England. Toto was the first ‘court painter’ in English history, but more appropriately (for a cairn terrier’s namesake) he was first trained as a maker of fireworks. At least so he was described in Giorgio Vasari’s classic Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Vasari was relieved to report that young Antonio repented of such a mundane trade to train with his father as a painter. Somehow King Henry VIII of England heard of young Toto, and hired him as “Serjeant Painter” for his court. Toto arrived in 1519, aged only 20. He married twice (to English women), and was naturalized in 1538. He survived Henry VIII and continued in the same role under Henry’s son King Edward VI. All this is known from literary evidence, not from any Toto paintings, for none of his artworks survive. It seems likely that he ‘gifted’ one or two paintings per year to Henry VIII, perhaps a condition of his position as Serjeant Painter to the court. In return (for as divine right monarch, and however fat, senile, and diseased he became, King Henry was the fountain of all English liberty and privilege) Toto received not only board and lodging but a few income-producing properties and, in 1540, a small monopoly. With Guy Fawkes Night approaching in England (November 5), it’s best to think of Toto as a fireworks maker, and certainly more appropriate when thinking of the psychology of cairn terriers. But what’s really strange is that young Toto was first hired, in 1519, to design a tomb for Henry VIII and his then Queen, Catherine of Aragon. Some drawings of that very elaborate project survive, but the tomb itself was never finished. There was of course the annulment, or divorce. Then Henry went through several queens, too many wars (with Scotland and France), and an off-again, on-again Reformation of the English church. And as Henry aged and became more paranoid, it became ever more dangerous even to contemplate his death. For whatever reason, Henry VIII was buried under a plain marble slab at Windsor. Much later, a new slab was provided, with a merely descriptive inscription. And Antonio Toto, once an apprentice dipintore di fantocci, now Serjeant Painter to the English court, lived on. ©

[Stanley]

QUEEN FOR A DAY

This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24.

Besides being one of the OT texts most used in Christian worship, this was the title of the music composed (by Georg Friederich Handel) for the 1734 wedding of Anne, Princess Royal, with William, heir apparent to the Prince of Orange. While one can’t doubt the princess’s religiosity, this was a bit of wishful thinking, for her marriage to Willam was dynastic and political. It’s only partly that the bride and groom were first cousins. More important was Britain’s ripening rivalry with France, in which a firmer alliance with the Netherlands might play a critical role. And a subtext was Princess Anne’s own dynastic ambition. She still harbored the idea that she (or an heir) might one day succeed to the British throne. This was not popular with her father, George II, nor with her brothers who, being male, were the more likely heirs apparent. Indeed during her first (false) pregnancy, Princess Anne returned to London in hopes that the child would be born on British soil. Her royal father would have none of it, and sent her back ‘home’. In the end, nothing came of it. George II survived them all; and when he died in 1760 the British crown passed to his grandson, King George III. Princess Anne was born in Hanover on November 2, 1709. Parliament’s Act of Settlement (1701) had already named the Hanover royal family as the likely successor to the crown, and so the Hanovers set themselves to learn English. Anne’s grandfather, George I, never mastered the tongue, and she spoke it much more fluently than even her father, who became King George II in 1727. Probably thinking of making his daughter more marriageable, George II made Anne “Princess Royal”, and she was perhaps the most popular of the Hanovers. She was tutored in music by Handel himself, in court life (and English ways) by the Countess of Portland, and made herself popular with leading parliamentary politicians. She was reported as saying that she “would die tomorrow to be Queen today,” and partly to forestall that her father put her on the European marriage market. First was the Crown Prince of Prussia, then (oddly or daringly) King Louis XV of France. That foundered on its own unreality, but one might say that Prince William of Orange came through in 1734 faute de mieux. Still, Anne van Hanover, as she became known in Holland, did her best to consolidate the power of the House of Orange in the maelstrom of Dutch domestic politics. When her husband did indeed succeed as Stadholder, in 1747, she did pretty well, and when he died in 1751 she became “governor” of the United Provinces and guardian to her royal son, then aged only three. It wasn’t quite like being a “real” queen regnant, but it was as close as history allowed her to get. ©

[Stanley]

TROTTER

If mankind is to profit freely from the small and sporadic crop of the heroically gifted it produces, it will have to cultivate the delicate art of handling ideas. Wilfred Trotter, in “The Commemoration of Great Men,” 1932.

Wilfred Trotter was not optimistic about the prospects for this ‘delicate art,’ party because he thought it was so very delicate. In the same lecture, he lamented our human inability “to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense.” If that were not enough cause for pessimism, or despair, Potter went further to note that some great ideas had the potential to become “more deadly than cholera or bubonic plague and far more cruel.” Here he cited—as particularly deadly—Aquinas, Calvin, Hegel, and Marx. Our common “herd instinct” made us all too likely to murder each other for the sake of such ideas. Given this litany of charges against human stupidity, it’s not surprising that Trotter has yet to attract a biographer. That’s a pity, for Wilfred Trotter lived a fascinating life. Born near Gloucester, England, on November 3, 1872, he suffered through childhood with a still undiagnosed musculoskeletal disease. Perhaps because of this, Trotter developed an ambition to become a medical doctor, and in 1892 graduated from the University of London with top honors in medicine. He followed that up with a science degree. After some years’ service as a demonstrator in anatomy, he turned to surgery. He became a pioneer in neurosurgery and a couple of other surgical fields, most notably oncology, and in 1928 he performed a daring bronchial surgery that restored King George V to health. This made him ‘Sir Wilfred,’ an honor he accepted reluctantly. Meanwhile, Trotter had developed an interest and expertise in psychoanalysis. In 1908, with Ernest Jones, he was one of the few English speakers to attend the first international conference on psychoanalysis. Trotter developed close personal relations with both Jones and Sigmund Freud. Impulsively and romantically, he proposed to Jones’s sister Elizabeth on a railway platform. That produced a happy marriage, although at the time he barely knew the woman. Later, Wilfred Trotter was instrumental in bringing Freud to London and safety from Hitler (speaking of murderous ideas). Then it was Trotter the surgeon who advised against any further operations for Freud’s fatal cancer. But it was as a social psychologist that Trotter became best known, his studies on what he called ‘the herd instinct’ coming out just in time for World War I. And all this busy while Wilfred Trotter treated each of his medical patients personally, as individuals, and gave fully of his professorial time and talents to mentor young surgeons at London’s University College Hospital. And I haven’t even mentioned his works on the history and philosophy of science. Some day, there must be a biography. ©.

[Stanley]

STURDY LASS

A sturdy lad . . . who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, all in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841.

In 1841 Emerson’s hero had to be a lad, and the “city dolls” Emerson contrasted him with were boys, too, only rendered effete by their privileged background. But here’s an Emersonian heroine, Alice Gossage, born unprivileged in rural Dane County, Wisconsin, on November 4, 1861. She never went to Congress (she had to get the vote first) and she never bought a township, but she did a lot of things and always landed on her feet. Her parents’ marriage was blighted by their poverty and her mother’s repeated pregnancies. Hoping for better things, the family moved further West, to Vermillion in the Dakota Territory. Here Alice started teaching first grade when she was 14. It didn’t bring in enough money, so she worked as a typesetter for one of Vermillion’s two (!!!) newspapers, and when that didn’t make family ends meet she went across the street to set type, also, for the other one. Meanwhile she turned down two men who’d wanted her for a wife, and it was in the process of trying to get another job, out west in Rapid City, where she found a husband who suited her. He was the editor and publisher of the Black Hills Journal. She didn’t get the job, but she got the guy, Joseph Gossage, not least because he agreed that she did not need to be a mother. But she was a wife-worker, and when Joseph fell ill and continued feeble, she took on more of the newspaper work. Alice sold ads, she wrote copy, she edited, and she continued, whenever necessary, to set type. And although she didn’t preach in a pulpit, like Emerson’s lad, she preached in the newspaper (now called the Rapid City Journal) about women’s rights to vote, to hold property, to have lives of their own. On the side, she taught Congregational Sunday School, played the church organ on Sundays, and became a founder-member of the South Dakota Press Association. As vice-president of the local women’s suffrage group and a leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she took to the streets, too. If all that wasn’t enough, Alice Gossage still taught school and, at home, gave private piano lessons. I can think of very few persons, lads or otherwise, who so closely followed the Emersonian model. Rapid City thought so too. When she died in 1929, the town closed down in her honor. Later, the state historical society published her courtship correspondence, hundreds of letters, 1879-1882, with Joseph Gossage. I haven’t read them yet, but I like to think they sound a bit Emersonian. ©

[Stanley]

Bob was admitted to hospital yesterday for a small routine operation. That's why he sent two Notes. He hopes to be back today but if he isn't you'll know why.

[Stanley]

I have reached out to Bob but as yet I haven't heard anything. I'll let you all know as soon as I have any news.....

[Stanley]

Here's what Bob said on the 3rd of November.
I sent two anniversary tea today because I am in for surgery today, a nephrectomy, which (with modern technology) will keep me in hospital for only 24 hours. There’s a cancer in my right kidney. It wouldn’t have been spotted but for my annual checkups as part of the Kidney transplant system here at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, so although I’d rather not have surgery for cancer, on the whole, I am very lucky to be able to have it at this early stage.
If anyone inquires please tell all friends etc that I expect to be on stream again on Wednesday.

He's a bit behind schedule so I have mailed him again! You will know as soon as I do.

[Tripps]

He's a bit behind schedule so I have mailed him again!

In the army it was called a 'non exemption parade' - though I think that even then, a hospital admission for kidney surgery might get you a 'chit'. Perhaps it was different in The Cheshires.

[Tripps]

I have reached out to Bob but as yet I haven't heard anything

reachout.png

[Stanley]