BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely. Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, 1922.

Among the irritating oddities of modern weather forecasting is the percent scam. “There is a 20% probability of rain tomorrow.” To which one might answer either “what else is new?” or “so what?” But the idea has serious scientific origins in the work of Lewis Fry Richardson, born in Newcastle on October 11, 1881. Richardson graduated with first-class honors from Cambridge in natural science but moved towards mathematics and while supervisor of a Meteorological Office field station (1913-1916) began to work on a computational model for weather forecasting. He perfected this idea while on duty as an ambulance driver in the First World War. This was a remarkable feat of memory as well as mathematics, for Richardson used a raft of data and a series of differential equations to come up with an accurate forecast, best expressed in probabilities. In all this, he referred to himself as “the computer” (one who computes). Richardson lived long enough (he died in 1953) to see his methods plugged into a “real” computer, ENIAC in fact, which he thought a “tremendous advance.” Richardson’s Quaker pacifism—which had put him in that ambulance in 1916 as a conscientious objector—would keep him from any regular university appointment, so he worked on a variety of scientific projects, mainly mathematical, for the rest of his life. The range of his work was truly astonishing, but for now let’s note that it included pioneering research on the statistical and logarithmic probabilities of international disputes leading to war. In several books, the old Quaker scientist urged this “forecasting” approach as the best way to resolve international disputes peacefully. ©

[Stanley]

When we hold the ballot . . . men will forget to tell us that politics are degrading and . . . will actually respect the women to whom they now talk platitudes and silly flatteries. Frances Dana Gage.

In 1858, my great-grandfather Daniel, just graduated from McKendree, went to Collinsville to hear “a lady of St. Louis” speak on women’s rights. He was much moved by her speech, not to advocate women’s suffrage (he took that fateful step in 1881) but to agree that woman’s aspirations were of equal value to man’s, and that she should have an equal chance, in law and in practice, to realize those aspirations. Who was that St. Louis lady? The likelihood is she was Frances Dana Gage, born in frontier Ohio on October 12, 1808. Frances was part of that New England Puritan diaspora that, in spreading westward, absorbed a number of enthusiasms, more than a fair share in Frances’s case. She can be identified with women’s rights, abolition, temperance, and universal public education, and through her husband James Gage with a Unitarian Universalism of a very evangelical nature. Besides her oratorical skills, she was (as “Aunt Fanny”) a gifted writer of children’s books, but “Aunt Fanny” also wrote for newspapers and “Frances Gage” published a novel or two and a volume of poetry all the while birthing and bringing up eight children (the boys all joined the Union army, of course). In Ohio, Frances was a prominent leader of suffrage and abolition movements. She and James moved to St. Louis in 1853, and despite the city’s relative conservatism she continued to pursue her goals publicly and noisily, and during the 1850s established herself on the lecture circuit. A rare bird indeed was Frances Dana Gage, and I do hope that it was she whose words jarred my ancestor loose from his Scots patriarchy and inspired him that very night to write movingly to his father about the aspirations of women.©

[Stanley]

This classification . . . provides a complete list of all the finite simple groups. However . . . the list is infinite. There are infinitely many finite simple groups. Richard Elwes, 2006.

In 1968, a good friend finished his math PhD, and at a very young age (if my memory serves, he was 20). If my memory serves, thesis was very short: about 25 pages of text and proofs. I visited the library stacks to verify, and found many short math PhDs. But let’s not generalize. The mathematician John Griggs Thompson is famous for extraordinarily lengthy proofs. It has something to do with an inherent feature of group theory (the Britannica explains that “theorems about simple groups have ramifications for all finite groups”). Thompson, who was born in Ottawa, Kansas, on October 13, 1932), won the Fields Medal in 1970 for a proof that took up an entire issue of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics (253 pages) and is now known as the “Odd Order Paper.” Indeed. John Griggs Thompson got his BA at Yale (1955), his PhD at Chicago (1959), served a post-doc at Harvard (1961-62), and then after 1968 spent most of his working life at Churchill College, Cambridge, where he is emeritus professor of mathematics. He holds a similar appointment at the University of Florida where, for a time, he was research professor. Oddly enough, he belongs to quite a number of groups himself, with honorary degrees from a raft of institutions and prizes from a flotilla of foundations, including the “mathematics Nobel,” the Abel Prize (2008), and an appointment to the Norwegian Academy. And group theory proofs have continued to grow. The so-called “Enormous Theorem” (announced in 1981), an enterprise inspired by Thompson’s work, represented a combined effort of hundreds of mathematicians and occupied over 10,000 published pages. It is currently being revised!!! ©

[Stanley]

listen. there's a hell of a good universe next door. let's go. e e cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings, who was born in Cambridge, MA, on October 14, 1894, is better known as e e cummings. Indeed in much (most?) of his poetry he eschewed capitalization, omitted punctuation, and played casually (it seems at first sight) with conventional word order and meanings. That avant-gardism, together with his volunteer service as an ambulance man in WWI, his love affair with Paris, and his veneration for Gertrude Stein makes him a member in good standing of the Lost Generation. And yet cummings was in many ways a conventional character. He was born to the Puritan purple, his father a Harvard professor of divinity who later became a renowned Unitarian minister. Young edward duly attended Harvard, did brilliantly in two degrees, became a fast friend to John Dos Passos and later, like Dos Passos, became very conservative in politics and an enthusiastic supporter of Joseph McCarthy. Some (much?) of his poetry is conventional, too, and he was an admirer of classical poetic forms and meters, especially the 14-line sonnet. He also embraced (although re-embraced may be more accurate) his religious faith, eccentrically as might be expected of a child of Unitarian intellectuals, but with seriousness and sincerity, and many cummings poems are suffused with god-talk. cummings wrote a lot of poetry, dabbled in other art forms (fiction, drama, and painting), and he might be unique among modern poets in the extent to which his poems have been set to music, mainly symphonic but also rock, and one at least as a ballet. I remember him for his “i sing of olaf glad and big whose warmest heart recoiled at war” and as a poet of the underdog. ©

[Stanley]

I am a woman who enjoys herself very much. Sometimes I lose, sometimes I win. Mata Hari.

October 15, 1917 was the day when the vamp who bequeathed her name to vamping was executed by firing squad at Vincennes, France. I write, of course, of Mata Hari. And what, you may say, death for vamping!??! Surely a bit harsh for the French, traditionally more tolerant than most in such matters. But the bloodbath we know as World War I was in full swing, and not going well for the allies. France and Britain had introduced a new weapon, the tank, which was to bring an end to the war, but it fizzled somewhat and the embarrassment was intense. Meanwhile, Mata Hari?? As her mom knew her she was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, born in Holland in 1876, married to a Scots officer in the Dutch colonial army, but latterly a famous courtesan, exotic dancer, and strip tease artiste who had acquired Mata Hari as a kind of nom de plume, as one might say in the stripping business. Come the Great War, she dabbled in intrigue as mistress to a variety of officers in several armies, and was amidst these liaisons probably a German agent but who had probably also been a French double agent. Pretty dangerous foreplay, really, because it was likely to arouse jealousy at best and dire suspicions at worst, and it was because of the latter that Mata Hari was arrested in February 1917. She was charged with divulging the secret of the tank to the Germans, thus causing the deaths of thousands of allied troops, when that was likely the responsibility of their generals (aided and abetted by tank enthusiast Winston Churchill). Refusing the traditional blindfold, Mata Hari went before the peléton d’exécution on 15th October 1917 at the relatively tender age of 41.©

[Stanley]

It is the story of a family with kids, and the things that can happen to them, good or bad. And I think everybody likes elephants. Laurent de Brunhoff, 2014.

The Babar the elephant stories have pleased multitudes of children (including ours) in many countries since the first one was illustrated by the painter Jean de Brunhoff and put out (in 1933) by his family’s own Parisian publishing house. Indeed Babar became a family business. Before his early death (1937), Jean de Brunhoff produced six more Babar tales, and then his son Laurent (who had also trained as a painter) published his first (of over 40) Babar books in 1947. Several Babars later, in the 1960s, Laurent met a young American scholar (Phyllis Rose, who was in Paris writing a biography of Josephine Baker) and they married and moved to Connecticut, where she was a professor of English (and now writes the Babar stories). Laurent and Phyllis have dealt honestly with criticisms that the Babar franchise is a massive exercise in post-colonial imperialism, Laurent conceding (“I think it’s right”) that his family was steeped in “France Overseas”, made rich by it, and that a great-great aunt had, indeed, shot an elephant while on African safari (and given up hunting when she discovered that her victim was pregnant). Laurent and his family have donated the bulk of the Babar manuscripts and artwork to museums in Paris and New York. But why all this on October 16? Because the very first Babar story (about “Bébé l’éléphant” who flees to Paris after he was orphaned by a European hunter) was told to Laurent (5) and his brother (4) in 1931 by his mother Cécile de Brunhoff, a classical pianist, who was born (as Cécile Sabouraud) on October 16, 1903. Indeed the first proofs were credited to both Cécile and Jean, but she insisted that her name be removed. Cécile lived on to 99 and Laurent at 89 is still going strong, both nearly as long-lived as their legendary Bébé the orphan.©
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

Attempting to guide others in paths where we find ourselves in the dark, shews, in my humble opinion, the last degree of arrogance and ignorance. Albrecht von Haller.

Modern intellectual life seems to require, certainly to encourage, specialization. Universities—wherein most intellectuals earn their bread and board—lay down rules for professional advancement that discourage breadth of knowledge, frown on the dabbler, and narrow conversations, which now tend to take place between specialists while the general public looks on askance. But it was not always so. Take Albrecht von Haller, born in Switzerland on October 16, 1708 and destined to hold appointments in Germany, France, and Britain, belong to several royal societies, and dabble expertly in science, medicine, theology, philosophy, and literature. A sickly lad in a devout Calvinist household, he began by learning biblical tongues (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek), then tried Latin satire, both his own original work and through translations of Latin and Greek poetry into German. He then turned his attention to the sciences, particularly anatomy, botany, and physiology, and it was as Professor of Medicine (at Gottingen, through the appointment of George II of Britain) that he found lasting fame. He has a claim to be the father of modern neurology, and Samuel Hahnemann thought him to be one of the pioneers of homeopathy, particularly in his procedures of “proving” medical therapies through clinical experiment with small doses on healthy subjects. But even at Gottingen von Haller could not bring himself to specialize, and we find him writing fiction, poetry, and political philosophy. He was, by the way, one of the first European poets to celebrate the beauty and majesty of mountains, which may be why he suddenly retired to Bern in 1753, where he kept on dabbling until 1777. ©

[Stanley]

Painted for the first and last time. Canaletto's inscription, certainly false, on the canvas of one of his London scenes.

Art history is well populated with painters who starved (in north-facing garrets?) for their art, only to be discovered later by collectors. These artists’ remains moulder in a Potter’s field while fortunes are made on their work. But it’s a rule that can’t be proven. Too many have beat this fate, few so emphatically as Giovanni Antonio Canal (better known as Canaletto, or “Little Canal”), son of Bernardo Canal, born in Venice on October 18, 1697. Already in his apprenticeships (first to his father, a theatrical scene painter) Canaletto painted scenes from life, setting up shop on site and rendering sights as one might see them oneself if one were a brilliant artist. Those who were not brilliant artists enjoyed seeing their visions made whole and beautiful, so they paid good money for Canaletto cityscapes, first of Venice and Milan. These paintings proved particularly attractive to Englishmen on the Grand Tour, holiday pics (so to speak) to show the folks and then hang in your grand staircase, and in due course Canaletto moved to London to be closer to his market. He could not bring Venice with him, but his London scenes (mainly 1746-55) proved just as popular and now grace the Wallace Collection, Woburn Abbey, and Castle Howard, but even more so the queen’s collections, for one of Canaletto’s very best customers was His Britannic Majesty George II, who bought scores of the Venetian’s oils and sketches, some direct and nearly 200 from a canny collector named Smith who knew a good thing when he saw it. The St. Louis Art Museum has a Venetian scene by him (“An Island in the Lagoon”), and histories of his times and places often use reprints of his vision of the theater of life. ©

[Stanley]

Watch it, Sucka!! Aunt Esther Anderson, in Sanford and Son, passim.

If “gold standard” is a criterion applicable to the art form known as the sitcom, then British sitcoms have set it. And they don’t always transfer to the American market. Sometimes they were too close to the bone, for instance a sitcom about life and death in a nursing home, others just too insular (so to speak) like the classic Dad’s Army. But there were successes, notably when the racist homophobe Alf Garnett in Till Death Do Us Part was translated into the homophobe racist Archie Bunker in All In the Family. But the rag and bone men Albert and Harold Steptoe, father and son in the BBC’s Steptoe and Son required more than translation to become NBC’s Sanford and Son; they became black. The father and son bits (Fred and Lamont Sanford) were done by the legendary Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson, and another new element was added with Aunt Esther, Fred’s sharp-tongued bible-belting sister (and nemesis). Aunt Esther was played, to the hilt, by LaWanda Page, an old friend of Foxx’s from their childhood days in St. Louis and then through their early careers as raunchy stand-up comedians on the black circuits. LaWanda Page was born in Cleveland as Alberta Peel on October 19, 1920, then moved to St. Louis where she met Foxx and began her nightclub career as “The Bronze Goddess of Fire” (fire-eating was part of her routine). Later on she moved to stand-up nightclub comedy, thus paralleling Foxx. She dropped the raunchy bits for her new role in Sanford, but not entirely: one of LaWanda’s early comedy albums was called “Watch It, Sucker” which (as “Watch it, Sucka”) became Aunt Esther’s catch phrase in her standoffs with Fred Sanford. ©

[Tripps]

“Gold standard” is a criterion applicable to the art form known as the sitcom, then British sitcoms have set it."

No mention of Last of the Summer Wine - I wonder if that could survive being moved to the Appalachians? There used to be some pretty good American series too - not for a long time though.

I vaguely remember Amos 'n' Andy from the 1950's, The Phil Silvers show (Sgt Bilko),was great, and I bought our first video recorder to tape 'Barney Miller' since it seemed to be on at a ridiculous time in the night. It never happened though, since they dropped it as soon as I got the recorder. Good news though - as I have just discovered - they are all on Youtube. Who needs a TV?

[Stanley]

David, here's a bit of hotel dropping.... I was staying at the Mark Hopkins in SF with my friend Susi. We booked in after a long drive from Santa Monica up El Camino Real. I had a shower and turned the TV on to find myself watching 'The English Hour', Benny Hill and Monty Python..... Surreal....

[Stanley]

We want our cattle to get fat on our land, and we do not want the fat removed to feed others. Jomo Kenyatta, 1952.

Librarians are wonderful folk, and in 1965 as I pondered my senior seminar paper (on “The Land Problem in Kenya, 1890-1950”) a sympathetic Penn librarian came through with several British Colonial Office white papers on the subject and, better, a small trove of pamphlets written, mainly in the 1930s, by the man who would be Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta. She also helped me find pictures of Kenyatta speaking at London’s Hyde Park Corner and some of his letters to London editors, all about imperialism and colonialism and the desires of Africans to have their lands back. Kenyatta was studying anthropology under Bronislaw Malinowski at the LSE, consorting with pan-Africanist intellectuals (including Ralph Bunche and Paul Robeson from the USA) and, acquiring the extra oomph it would take to become leader of the Kenyan independence movement, to urge capitalist virtues on his people, and to distance himself from tribal practices that he had defended as a young man. He also may have become a leader of the Mau Mau rebellion. At any rate he was imprisoned for it, then led the negotiations that birthed the nation of Kenya. Kenyatta’s party duly won the independence elections and he was installed as president on June 1, 1964. Not bad going for a Kikuyu tribal orphan whose birthdate no one knew but (following his practice) arbitrarily assigned to October 20, 1891. And I wrote him in as a hero in my senior seminar paper, which he indubitably was, although I unaware of the dictatorial practices that would increasingly characterize his presidency. His son Uhuru Kenyatta, thought to be a more democratic figure, was elected president in 2013. ©

[Stanley]

There have been two great revelations in my life. The first was be-bop. The second was homeopathy. Dizzy Gillespie.

Many jazz greats have been apolitical, but one wasn’t. In 1964, discontent with Johnson and Goldwater, he announced his run for the presidency and, fatally over-confident, said that his top appointments would include Duke Ellington at State, Miles Davis at the CIA, Louis Armstrong at Agriculture, Malcolm X as Attorney General, and Charlie Mingus at the head of the new Department of Peace. Today his campaign buttons attract high prices on the souvenir-antique market. He was John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, whose long career began way back in Cheraw, South Carolina, on October 21, 1917. His dad was a band leader, so Dizzy had his pick of instruments, settling on the trumpet. Along the way, he played with all the greats, but (Dizzy by name and nature) his career was marked with spats and (almost always) reconciliations. The first big spat (concerning a disputed spit-ball) was with Cab Calloway, but he also performed with Earl Hines, Billie Eckstine, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, latterly Stevie Wonder, and so on and so forth almost to infinity. In the end they all revered Dizzy Gillespie’s inventiveness, his genius with that beat-up and bent-up horn, and (yes) his dizziness. Fed up with his native land, he evaded the draft in 1942, became a Bahá’i, and ran for president in 1964 (he would have called his Washington pad the Blues House, had he won), but he did serve several times as the State Department’s ambassador of music (“apologizing for what the State Department had done”). Dizzy ran out of gas just before his 75th birthday concert (it would have been his 33rd gig at Carnegie Hall) but the show went on for him without him. He died a couple of months later. ©

[Stanley]

Genetics and biochemistry: two doors leading into the same room. George Wells Beadle.

The drama of DNA’s “discovery” by Crick and Watson (et al) has given some the impression that not much was known about it before 1953. But like most discoveries in science much territory had already been mapped. Among the most important of the DNA pioneers was George Wells Beadle, born on a small farm (50 acres) near Wahoo, NB, on October 22, 1903. I have no idea how small Wahoo High School was in 1920, but George stood out, and one of his teachers urged him to study science at the state university. So George gave up on farming and went into genetics, first wheat, then corn, and then (for his PhD at Cornell) the old reliable fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He then embarked on a whirlwind career that took him (in very short order) from Cornell to Cal Tech to Harvard to Cal Tech (again) then Stanford then Cal Tech (yet again) and finally Chicago, where he assumed the presidency in September 1961. Along the way, in 1935, Beadle visited at the Paris Institut de biologie physico-chemique where he began his collaboration with Professor Boris Ephrussi. Their work (on the embryonic development of eye pigment in Drosophila) led in turn to collaboration with Edward Tatum on the genetics of the fungus Neurospora. In these collaborations, Beale and his colleagues showed that “genes act by regulating definite chemical events” in organic growth and development, for which Beale and Tatum shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. It was awarded to them in 1958, but most of their work had been done before Crick and Watson began tinkering at the Cavendish, standing “on the shoulders of giants,” as per usual in science. ©

[Stanley]

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead. Sinclair Lewis.

Literary prizes like the Pulitzer often raise controversy, usually over matters of critical judgment rather than morality. But it was not always so. When in 1941 Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler (H. L. Mencken’s favorite Professor Pecksniff) chaired the Pulitzer trustees, he vetoed the prize committee’s choice of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms on moral grounds, and no Pulitzer was awarded that year. It wasn’t the first time morals had reared their curly blond locks in the Pulitzer process. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, published on October 23, 1920, was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer committee for the 1921 award, but was nixed by the trustees who awarded it instead to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (a good novel but not a patch on her coruscating The House of Mirth). They didn’t like Lewis’s grim, sardonic portrayal of the small town Midwest (the heart of America in more ways than one) as offering only “a range of grotesque vulgarity.” Never mind whether Main Street is a good novel (many today think not), but the committee thought so and what Lewis later called “the Main Street burglary” engineered by the trustees rankled a good deal. Perhaps the Pulitzer trustees tried to make amends six years on by approving the prize committee’s 1927 recommendation of Lewis’s Arrowsmith. If so, Lewis got his revenge. In a famous public letter quoting the Pulitzer standard (that fiction winners should present “the highest standard of American manners and manhood”) Lewis turned them down flat, charging that the whole business was a conspiracy to make American fiction “safe, polite, obedient and sterile.” Three years later Lewis copped the Nobel, which he accepted. ©

[Stanley]

My harmonica was like a friend who didn't give a damn whether I could see or not. Sonny Terry.

A century ago most poor kids in rural North Carolina, especially if they were black, were the children of laborers or sharecroppers. But Saunders Terrell, born on October 24, 1911, grew up on a freehold farm and aimed to be a farmer. A series of eye injuries left him almost blind, and so at 16 that ambition had to be laid aside. Besides farming, though, his dad taught him how to play the harmonica and soon Saunders started to make good money at it, playing for a while with a white band even though he could still see well enough to know they were white. He also could still see well enough to shoot a promoter who refused to pay him (the guy made the mistake of wearing white trousers). But it was as blind Sonny Terry, with guitarist “Blind Boy” Fuller, that he played Carnegie Hall (1938) and began to prosper. Then, after Fuller’s death in 1941, Sonny Terry hooked up with guitarist Brownie McGhee and became downright famous. Terry and McGhee played folk blues for white audiences and (in larger combos) “jump blues” for black audiences until, in the 1960s, folk blues won out and the pair played almost exclusively to (and recorded for) the folk audience. Along the way, Sonny Terry also acted (Broadway, Hollywood, and TV). Their vogue during the 50s and 60s (Terry directly influenced Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan) has meant that their music is still strongly associated with progressive causes, and since their deaths (Terry’s in 1986, McGhee’s in 1996) has been used to promote reforms of various sorts, most recently environmentalism and energy efficiency. One imagines that Sonny Terry learned a lot about both back when he was Saunders Terrell, aiming to stay forever on that North Carolina smallholding. ©

[Tripps]

I've got lots of records by these two including a vinyl LP from the late 1950's. Sonny Terry is surely the best harmonica (Calluna would say 'gob iron') player of his type ever.
I read a long time ago that off the stage they couldn't stand each other, and went their separate ways quickly after a gig. I checked - looks like it was only part of the story, but it might have been true.

They were a professional duo, but it doesn't sound like there was much harmony off the stage (especially in the last ten years of their partnership).
Kip Lornell (in the notes to Brownie McGhee: The Folkways Years, 1945–1959) describes McGhee and Terry as "not close personal friends" despite having performed together for forty years.
Chris Smith (in The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings) mentions how the 1972 album Sonny & Brownie led to their breakup: A&M [Records] set up a tour to promote the album but, by McGhee's account, Terry refused to learn new songs or hire a band. This provoked the final souring of their relationship, and thereafter they never spoke to each other and met only on stage until the act broke up in 1982.


Here's John Henry

[Stanley]

Thanks for the link David, I enjoyed that!

[Stanley]

For ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicine. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, Nov. 13, 1818, on hearing of the death of Abigail Adams.

Let’s celebrate a wedding anniversary, the wedding in question being between Abigail Smith and John Adams, on October 25, 1764, in Braintree, Massachusetts. Their marriage would last 54 years, until Abigail’s death on October 28, 1818. It was an interesting marriage altogether, Abigail being from a wealthy and prominent mercantile family, John merely an aspiring lawyer of very modest origins. But in the colonies courtship was beginning to be governed by the young, rather than by their parents, and romantic love was just taking hold as an ideal. Indeed, much of the Adams-Smith courtship took place at young people’s Shakespeare readings in Boston and Braintree (itself a sign of cultural change in a province where the theater was still thought immoral). Talented, intelligent, and serious, the Adamses produced a vivid lifelong dialogue in letters and notes; successful social, intellectual, and political friendships in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, New York, and Washington; a set of interesting children; and some fireworks, too, as when in 1776 (annus mirabilus) Abigail wrote to John, then engaged in birthing a new nation, that the time had come to recognize women’s rights, to “remember the ladies.” In terms of American letters, Abigail’s greatest contribution may have been (circa 1812) to help Benjamin Rush engineer a rapprochement between her husband and Thomas Jefferson. This led to a magnificent reflective correspondence between the old friends who had been made enemies by politics. Their extended exchange of views ended only with their deaths on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence. ©

[Stanley]

The absolute freedom of woman will be the dawn of man¹s regeneration. Tennie Claflin, Lady Cook, 1897.

“Wall Street Aroused” announced the headline in the New York Times, and since it was 1870 let’s assume no double entendre was intended. The story concerned the first brokerage house run by women, Victoria California Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennie. Though backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, the brokerage didn’t survive the Panic of 1873, but the sisters picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and started all over again. Victoria as a leading suffragette and the first woman candidate for the American presidency. The younger sister (Tennessee Celeste Claflin was her full name) was born in Ohio on October 26, 1844 and may have inherited more of her father’s character, a small-time lawyer, insurance fraudster, and snake oil salesman right out of Twain or Harte. Tennie shared her older sister’s support for “free love” (for women), total abstinence from alcohol, full civil rights for freed slaves, and was the more active of the two in their next venture, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which (inter alia) broke the story of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s amour with Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of a prominent parishioner. Perhaps, after all, Wall Street had been “aroused.” The Street was certainly outraged by Tennie’s support for labor unions, the eight hour day, the Communist Manifesto, and the First International. Nor did she calm with age. Tennessee ran for congress (in New York), became honorary colonel of a black regiment, married Francis Cook, an English baronet, and later lived with her grandniece Utica Celestina, Lady Beecham, the estranged wife of Sir Thomas Beecham, the eminent conductor. Tennessee, Lady Cook died in 1923, in Beecham’s London townhouse. ©

[Stanley]

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas. Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it. Sylvia Plath.

Most writers are not self-destructive, but enough of them are to suggest that deep pain can accompany the compulsion to express deeply felt things. Thus, on this day, we celebrate the short lives of the Welshman Dylan Marials Thomas (born 27 October 1914) and the American Sylvia Plath (born 27 October 1932). Thomas, now best known for his radio “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood, played the wild Celtic lad all of his life, drank suicidally, and died in New York, aged 39, during an American lecture tour. His body went back to Laugharne, Wales, where his grave is marked by a simple wooden cross. He also has a plaque in Poet’s Corner at Westminister Abbey. Plath’s poetry is introspective, sometimes downright funny, and concentrates much on women’s domestic imprisonment. Potatoes hiss viciously in the pot, babies cut their teeth and wail, Plath the cook cuts the top of her thumb nearly off: “What a thrill--/ My thumb instead of an onion./ The top quite gone.” Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London in 1963. Eleven years later, celebrating a festival of her work by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the New York Times wrote (beautifully and angrily, I think) that Plath’s poetry is “incisive, bright, intelligent, not the least bit self-pitying in spite of its subject matter. She was full of life and had so much to look forward to that one can hardly believe, even though the evidence is in, that she chose to put her head into the oven like an unbaked loaf of bread. Inexpert baker that she was, the loaf came out cold. No one could make a meal of it.” ©

[plaques]

I was over in Heptonstall the other day. Its one of those Brigadoon type of villages where you have to get lost three times before you find it. While I was there I thought I'd look up Silvia Plath's grave only to find it surrounded by the Sylvia Plath appreciation society. They had tidied up the grave and added flowers. They then gave a number of readings from her works. Its nice to know that she is not forgotten even in such a remote Yorkshire village. Link.

[Stanley]

I read in the Bible, when I was a boy, that it was right to take in the stranger and administer to those in distress. I thought it always safe to do right. Levi Coffin, 1880.

We now celebrate as heroes those who ran the Underground Railway, but once it was organized crime, highly risky, illegal, not the sort of thing we’d counsel young people to get involved in. Yet it attracted enough people to threaten slavery. One “conductor” was Mark Twain’s future father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, who established his “station” in Elmira, New York when he was just starting out in business. One of Langdon’s first “passengers” was Frederick Douglass. But the most famous “conductor” was Levi Coffin, who began his railway career in an even more dangerous place, North Carolina, where he was born on October 28, 1798. His Quaker family had taken against slavery and started to do something about it, helping local slaves escape, hiding them, moving them along northwards, as early as Levi’s 15th birthday. As the business became too hot to handle locally, in the 1820s, the Coffins and several other Quaker families moved to Indiana, but burglary was in their blood and they couldn’t stop stealing. Levi and his Carolina-born wife, Catherine White, built a house in Newport (it still stands) especially designed to conceal stolen human beings, and Catherine ran a sewing circle of otherwise respectable ladies that made clothes for the contraband. One of those was Eliza Harris, whose dramatic escape across the frozen Ohio made her a heroine in Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Soon the Coffins had to move to Ohio, for safety’s sake, but they kept at their careers in crime. By the time of the Civil War, Levi and Catherine had conducted thousands of passengers to freedom, and they didn’t stop then, either, campaigning against “the spirit of caste” and raising over $100,000 for the Freedman’s Aid Society. But that’s another story. ©

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This I accomplish. Harriet Powers, letter to an unknown correspondent in Keokuk, Iowa, 1896.

Many slaves did not know their birthday. Frederick Douglass believed this was yet further evidence of slaveowners’ desire to rob their human property of their individual identity. Yet often plantation books do tell us much about our peculiar institution. William Faulkner used this, brilliantly, in his Go Down, Moses stories. It is also thanks to plantation records—and to a slave’s creativity—that we know Harriet Powers’s birthday, October 29, 1837. Born into slavery near Athens, Georgia, and freed by the Civil War, Harriet distinguished herself as a skilled seamstress and quiltmaker. It is in that latter guise that she is known to posterity even though, today, only two of her quilts survive, one in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, the other in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Her quilts tell Bible stories and record the heavens, rising suns, waxing moons and shooting stars, but do so in a way that suggests to many and proves to some the vitality of the African heritage in American slave culture. The one surviving picture of Harriet, probably taken when one of her quilts was exhibited at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, shows that she also used the same techniques to make her aprons. These stirring examples of American folk art, now considered priceless, did not save Harriet from a life of poverty. She sold one of them for $5, the other for not much more. Still, Harriet and her husband lived respectable lives and, at their deaths, could afford a headstone. It has recently (2009) been rediscovered at the Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery in Athens, where Harriet Powers lived through slavery, into freedom, and died (we now know) on January 1, 1910. ©

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A pig resembles a saint in that he is more honored after death than during his lifetime. Irma Rombauer.

One of the great might not have beens in American culinary history was that Irma Starkloff of St. Louis, daughter of a German immigrant doctor-politician-diplomat, almost married Booth Tarkington of Indianapolis. Had Irma (born on October 30, 1877) married a successful writer, she would not have written The Joy of Cooking, America’s favorite book about what can come out of the kitchen when you follow sage advice. But Irma’s family wanted her to marry a well-connected second-generation German lawyer, and in 1899 she became Irma Rombauer. And for 30 years they lived the lives of Riley, both active in city and state politics and in the fashionable First Unitarian Church. So Irma entertained a lot, although in the kitchen she supervised and rarely cooked. But Mr. Rombauer’s chronic depression got the best of him early 1930 and Irma found herself a widow without means. So naturally she wrote a cookbook, using her $6,000 net worth to get it privately published n 1932. How this non-cook managed is shrouded in mystery, but she had belonged to the Unitarian Women’s Alliance and the ladies had talked a good deal about cooking. Anyway, pardon the pun, Joy sold like hotcakes. Reviewers enjoyed Irma’s no-nonsense, informative approach, her humor, the way she laid out the recipes almost in story form, the hints (Yorkshire pudding should be mixed at room temperature and then rest cold before baking) and the background information about foodstuffs (like where the sirloin comes from). Irma died in 1962, but her Joy of Cooking marches on, still a family enterprise, now approaching 20 million copies in several English language editions. And, yes, there is a French edition. ©