BOB'S BITS

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The aire and genious of Gardens operate on humane spirits towards virtue and sanctitie and prepare them for converse with good Angells. John Evelyn

For one to be born and, 86 years on, die in the same house suggests a life of glacial stability. Had the kings that the Evelyn family served been wiser or suppler, that might have been John Evelyn’s fate. But they were the Stuarts, and so Evelyn lived through an era of wars and revolutions. Luckily for posterity, he kept a diary, not as gossipy (or spicy) as that of his fellow royal servant Samuel Pepys, but one that has enriched our understanding of Evelyn’s troubled times. John Evelyn was born at Wotton House, Surrey, on October 31, 1620. Besides their country estates, the Evelyns were in the gunpowder business and well known at the Stuart court. The Civil Wars made this connection a declining asset, and John prudently fled to France where he met and wedded his child bride (an heiress also connected to the Stuart court) and engaged in royalist conspiracy. At the Restoration of monarchy, in 1660, Evelyn was well-placed, and he enjoyed some marks of royal favor throughout his long life. But Evelyn is better seen as a well-connected gentleman than a budding civil servant. We know him best as a reflective, informative diarist, but his family’s recent gift of the whole Evelyn archive to the British Library will enable scholars to introduce us to Evelyn as a man of letters, a pioneering horticulturalist and member of the Royal Society, even as a proto-ecologist, and also (briefly) as landlord to the Tsar of all the Russias, Peter the Great, whose imperial pleasure it was to ride roughshod (in a wheelbarrow, no less) through Evelyn’s fine gardens and lay waste to his hallways. The Tsar moved back to Petersburg in time for Evelyn to repair some of the damage before his own death, at Wotton House, in 1706. ©

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A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to see it. Michaelangelo Buonarroti.

On November 1, 1512, 503 years ago today, the startling frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Cappela Sistina or, even more correctly, the Sacellum Sixtinium, for the ancient chapel had been renamed in 1480 after Pope Sixtus IV) were for the first time opened to public view. The artist, Michaelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was already famous and had been working on the ceiling since 1508, commissioned by Pope Julius II (who was also the patron of Raphael but not of Leonardo, who worked for the Borgias). Born in Caprese (near Florence) in 1475, the son of a government official, Michaelangelo had come to the notice of Lorenzo de Medici, and under Medici patronage in Florence and French patronage in Rome had already completed several remarkable works, including the miraculous sculptures Pietà (1498) and David (1504), when he was called to Rome to work on the Sistine ceiling. The Sistine paintings are devoted entirely to biblical scenes including The Creation of Adam (pictured). Michaelangelo later returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint (1535-1541, on the altar wall) The Last Judgment. Michaelangelo Buanarroti would become, perhaps, the most famous of all artists. He continued to create memorable art until his death, in 1564, aged 88. ©

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We declare lynching is an indefensible crime . . hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity, debasing and degrading to every person involved. Jessie Daniel Ames, Pledge Against Lynching, 1930.

Jessie Daniels’ father was an atheist, and held to this view in the unlikely setting of Palestine, Texas. He was therefore upset when young Jessie, born November 2, 1883, went off to a Methodist college and converted to Methodism. Besides Methodism, Jessie converted to a few other things, deciding it was her mission to rid the world of its several ills. She started with yellow fever, having married an Army doctor, Roger Ames, and worked with him to eradicate that plague. After he died in Panama in 1914 Jessie (now with three small children) returned to Palestine to help her mother run the family store. help others run the local Methodist church, and try to put a few things right in Texas, especially for women and for African-Americans. She led the women’s suffrage movement in Texas and within five years had become the founding president of the Texas League of Women Voters. She espied a link between women’s rights and “lynch law” (the lynchers’ claim that they were protecting white womanhood), and as director of the women’s committee of the Commission for Interracial Cooperation Jessie founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She gathered tens of thousands of signatures from women across the south and publicly campaigned against this most brutal of American traditions, but ironically Jessie’s devotion to states rights was used by defenders of lynching (such as Senator Tom Connally of Texas) to help defeat federal anti-lynching legislation. Not one to take no for an answer, Jessie Daniel Ames agitated on suffrage and civil rights issues until she laid her cudgels down on February 21, 1972, in Austin, Texas. ©

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Kings and governments may err/ But never Mr. Baedeker. Jacques Offenbach lyric in La Vie Parisienne, 1866.

In 1902, aged 27, my ‘unmarriageable’ grandmother returned home to Grundy Center, IA, to teach school. She also joined a women’s circle whose members were seized with a yen to travel. They went nowhere, but for several years one of their monthly meetings was devoted to an imagined trip, to Berlin, to Brussels, to London and Paris of course. One member researched trains to New York or Montreal, another steamship lines to the main European ports, and others would get the group to where it wanted to go and tell them what they must see (and where they must stay) when they got there. Their sources included railway and steamship brochures, and grandma used her dad’s leather-bound volumes of Stoddard’s Lectures (1897-1898). They also occasionally used an appropriate Baedeker’s, e.g. Baedeker’s Great Britain (3rd edn., 1893) or Baedeker’s Paris (11th edn., 1894). These young women were well educated but their minds’ eyes needed help in envisaging these grand tours, and Baedekers guides were already the gold standard for those who would travel or, in their case, for those who wished to travel. Karl Baedeker was the creator of these guides, and he was born in Essen, Prussia, on November 3, 1801. By the time Karl died, in 1859, he had published 17 Baedeker’s in German and already several in English. Their meticulous detail, their star rating system for hotels and restaurants, their practical advice (how many steps does it take to climb Milan’s great cathedral tower?), made them the Michelins of their day. Baedeker’s family, knowing a good thing when they saw it, continued and expanded the series that, one day, would help grandma and her friends to imagine themselves right out of Grundy Center and across the world. ©

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My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Wilfrid Owen.

On November 11, 1918, as Harriet Owen listened to Shrewsbury church bells celebrate the armistice, her doorbell rang. It was a telegram announcing the death of her son Wilfred, on November 4, 1918. Many soldiers died futilely in the last week of that futile war, each an unspeakable tragedy, but Owen’s death was remarkable for he had spoken of it, in verse, and in ways that to many still evoke its horrors and its waste. Wilfred Owen, born in 1893 and reasonably well educated for a railwayman’s son, joined up in 1915 and was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in June 1916. He saw rather too much action and was in a Scottish hospital being treated for shell shock when he ran into Siegfried Sassoon, another war poet. The two found that they shared a grim, poetic vision of their war, and they may have advised each other not to return to the front. If so, it was advice neither followed, and both returned to the front line and to foolhardy acts of courage. (Owen received the Military Cross, posthumously, for action on October 1-2, 1918.) After the war, Sassoon (who survived his own reckless bravery) called attention to the moral brilliance of Owen’s poetry, and the majority view is still, I think, on Sassoon’s side. However, in her astounding Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995), novelist Pat Barker recreates a fictional-historical Owen, understands and pities his terror, indeed uses it brilliantly, but also points out that Owen’s powerful verse, especially taken in conjunction with his undoubted courage, has led us to value far too highly his particular species of bravery. This Armistice Day we might do well to remember Pat Barker’s warning that conspicuous courage cannot be a military monopoly. ©

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Anything noisy is poorly designed. Raymond Loewy.

About 30 years ago I bought a nice pair of walking shoes whose laces would untie themselves after a short walk. I kept those laces for a long time, as a cautionary reminder that “everything is designed, unfortunately.” Such examples spurred the career of Raymond Loewy, who would become known as “the man who designed America.” It was an odd fate for a French military hero, born in Paris on November 5, 1893, but he had produced a prizewinning airplane design at the tender age of 17. In the 1920s, Loewy moved to New York and resumed designing, first for Macy’s, but soon he hit his stride as an industrial designer. In 1949, his face appeared on Time magazine’s cover, surrounded by his designs that by then ranged from Coke bottles to ink jars, from the lettering on cigarette packs and tractors to easy chairs, steamships to Studebakers. And Loewy kept going until 1980, when he retired back to France, leaving his business in his daughter’s capable hands. The iconic post-war Studebakers, so streamlined that they moved when parked, were his most memorable design successes, but his streamlining also marked the Pennsylvania Railroad’s famous S1 Steam Engine, a sleek, steel powerhouse that whisked the Pennsy’s crack Broadway Limited between New York and Chicago (via Philadelphia) at speeds yet to be equaled. Among other notably Loewy designs were Greyhound’s Scenicruiser, the livery for the first “Air Force One,” those red Coca Cola fountain dispensers that dominated the lunch counters of my youth, and quite a large number of still familiar industrial logos (e.g. Quaker Oats, Nabisco, and Shell). But, as far as I know, Raymond Loewy was not responsible for a single solitary shoelace, let alone a pair of them. ©

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Welcome to Bedrock. Sign over the door leading to the lithography workshop, School of Fine Art, Boston University

Solnhofen limestone is a fine-grained Jurassic age deposit. The beds (in Bavaria) are famed today because they have yielded up fossils of photographic quality, notably the dinosaur-bird Archaeopteryx, feathers and all. But the fossils were found because the Solnhofen beds were being quarried for printing stones. Just as this limestone preserved even the wings of ancient butterflies, so it takes, and then transfers, the finest-grained images. It is, in a word, the original source of lithographic stone. Oddly enough, the process was invented by an actor-playwright, Johann Alois Senefelder, who wanted to print his latest play but couldn’t afford the fees. Born in Prague, November 6, 1771, to a peripatetic German actor, Senefelder had originally hoped to attain more respectable status through education, but his father’s death forced him into the theatre. In financial difficulties in the early 1790s, in Munich, and wanting to publish his latest script, Sennefelder discovered his printing process in the oddest way (writing a laundry list on a piece of limestone with a grease pencil), but he was a clever young fellow and almost immediately (1796) was in the printing business. Unlike many inventors, he found fame and fortune (including a royal pension from the eccentric Bavarian monarch). Senefelder first published music scores and estate maps, his process (and Solnhofen stone) being particularly appropriate for transferring very fine detail to printed paper. For the same reason, lithography today is primarily a fine art process, although in the 19th century its more widespread use made Alois Senefelder rich and famous and, as a by-product, gave us insight into the mysteries and beauties of evolution. ©

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I have always thought that women do not get a fair deal, and that if we got together we could do something about it. Gertrude Mary Denman, 1946.

Besides workers and plutocrats, the industrial revolutions of Britain and America produced surprisingly large and prosperous middle classes. By the turn of the last century, they were feeling their oats. The odd result was an explosion of radical liberalism, marked by efforts to rein in the plutocrats and, at the very least, to ameliorate the lives of the workers. The most famous exemplars were politicians (e.g. in the US the Roosevelt cousins Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin) but of lay crusaders there was a noisy and accomplished plenty. Some (e.g. Jane Addams) have already been mentioned in these notes. Today we highlight Gertrude Mary Denman (née Pearson), daughter of one Liberal peer and wife of another. Born on November 7, 1884, Lady Denman spent a brief tutelage in public affairs as the wife of Australia’s Governor-General, but returned to Britain in 1914 and for 40 years did what she could to level the British landscape and to create opportunities for women to lead public lives, to advance the res publica. A wealthy woman (and director of her father’s charitable trust), Lady Denman believed private wealth could only be justified by public service. So “Trudie” served. She is best known as one of the founders (from 1917 to 1946 the Director) of the Women’s Institutes, but she was also a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment, founder and first director (1930-1954) of the National Family Planning Association, and during both wars she served in a variety of government posts, from 1938 to 1945 as Director of the Ministry of Agriculture’s women’s branch where the “Land Girls” were her special responsibility. She quit when the ministry refused to pay the girls fairly for a fair day’s work. ©

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I concluded at the last to set up my staff at the Library door . . . reducing that place which then lay ruined and waste to the public use of students. Thomas Bodley.

Today let’s talk of Protestantism, treason, and learning—and witchcraft too, for as devotees of Harry Potter might know, it is the 413th anniversary of the Bodleian Library, opened on November 8, 1602, in the presence of (amongst others) its chief donor and principal gadfly, Sir Thomas Bodley. Bodley gave much money and time, and quite a few books, to the project. Bodley’s donations used to be exhibit A in the argument that, in England, there was a link between the Reformation and the rise of a special sort of public charity, “improving” gifts. Historians are not so sure of that any more, but it’s still quite obvious that Thomas Bodley was a Protestant of the hotter variety. His parents spirited him abroad during the reign of Bloody Mary, and there Bodley learned his catechism from none other than Beza, Knox, and Calvin. Returning home after Elizabeth’s accession, Bodley continued to learn (at Merton College, Oxford, where he became a fellow) and learned to bemoan the decline of the university library. He left Oxford to become rich, and when rich he did something about it. As for witchcraft, it’s not only that the Harry Potter saga was filmed partly in Duke Humphrey’s Library (today the Bodleian’s magnificent reading room for ancient books and manuscripts). It’s also that Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (1390-1447), the original library’s patron, was himself implicated in witchcraft. His wife, Lady Eleanor Cobham, was accused and convicted of using witchcraft to vault Humphrey into his nephew’s throne. Duke Humphrey, the would-be beneficiary of her spells, was thrown into prison and (awaiting his treason trial) was found dead. Poison was suspected. Thanks to books, and the libraries that hold them, you can find out whether those suspicions were justified. ©

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Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. Hedy Lamarr.

Movie mogul Louis B. Mayer called her “the world’s most beautiful woman,” and don’t respond that ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ A brief glance at any of Hedy Lamarr’s publicity photos will show that at the worst Mayer had it about right. But to begin with she wasn’t Hedy Lamarr. She was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, born in Vienna on November 9, 1914, into an assimilating Jewish family. Discovered in her teens by a Berlin producer, Hedwig enjoyed fame for her role in the 1933 movie Ecstasy,but in 1937 she was trying to escape from an unhappy marriage and looking for work. Mayer was in Europe looking for talent. They found each other in Paris, and after she accepted Mayer’s dictat to change her name, Hedy Lamarr moved to Hollywood and a series of unchallenging roles opposite such actors as Charles Boyer, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy. But she also became an inventor, motivated by an inquiring mind, by boredom with her typical castings, and by a strong desire to help defeat Naziism, she and an avant-garde composer worked out a way to jam radio controlled torpedoes. It’s called the frequency-hopping spread-spectrum invention, and in 1942 the US Navy was unwilling to gamble on it. The navy finally adopted it in 1960, and it’s now basic to such everyday miracles as Bluetooth transmissions, GPS technology, and CDMA cell phone networks. Hedy got no money for it at the time, her patent having expired, and during the 1960s and 1970s she was arrested several times for shoplifting. Famously, she said in her defense that she had made $30 million but spent $30 million. Recognition for her inventions finally came in the 1990s, and Lamarr died in 2000 leaving an estate worth just over $3 million. ©

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Your love and my life are one and indivisible. Your love and my soul are synonymous. What else could heaven make us, but each other? Mabel Todd to Austin Dickinson, June 1885.

What went on between and around Emily Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd echoed down three generations and is too complicated for short prose. Mabel Loomis was born in Cambridge, MA, on November 10, 1856, and married the astronomer David Todd in 1879. The couple moved to Amherst, and for the last six years of Emily’s life (1880-1886) she and Mabel were neighbors who never met. During and after those years, Mabel had a love affair with Emily’s brother Austin, consummated often in Emily’s house and perhaps à trois with David. Meanwhile, Emily heard Mabel sing and conceived in her a platonic friend, sending her poems, small gifts, and letters. The poems convinced Mabel of Emily’s rare genius, but she did try to “improve” them in her edition of 1891. After the deaths of the principals (Emily, David, Mabel, Austin and his wife), the Dickinson and Todd families fought over the poems, letters, and more pointedly over the significance of the Mabel-Austin liaison. In this war, which expressed as a battle of biographies, some letters were destroyed, but Emily’s poems survived in Ms. with all their genius oddities intact for Thomas H. Johnson to put together in his revelatory The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955). Critics today ponder much over whether this or that poem tells us that Emily actually imagined what was going on between her brother and her neighbor, but the poems say so very much more that it is superfluous speculation. Suffice it to say that Mabel Todd had an interesting life, and that we owe to her much of what we do know about that strange sensibility upstairs in Amherst. That Mabel loved Emily’s poetry is more significant than that she also loved Emily’s brother. ©

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Mail from Uncle Bob......

Paul Gerken, a member of the anniversary note mailing list, notes that I got Ms. Lamarr’s torpedo invention quite backwards. It was designed to frustrate German efforts to use jamming techniques on American torpedoes, not to jam German ones.
It was therefore (it seems to me) a much more difficult technical problem than I had thought, and this should be noted in favor of Hedy Lamarr and her collaborator. Thanks, Bob Bliss

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It would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own. Anna Katherine Green.

Looking at the field of successful whodunit authors, one might be excused for thinking that women have a special talent for this sort of writing. The names come easily enough: Christie, Rendell, Marsh, more recently George, Dereske, and Paretsky. Wikipedia lists well over 200. But who was mother of them all? Here we must turn to Anna Katherine Green, born on November 11, 1846, whose The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story (1878) was the first of over three dozen novels devoted to crime (mainly murder) and its delicious detection. Anna started out as a poet but despite some encouragement from Ralph Waldo Emerson failed to find recognition. She then married an out-of-work actor and had kids. These delays notwithstanding, she turned towards her father’s trade (he was a lawyer often involved in criminal cases) and painstakingly constructed her first case. It took her six years to write, turned in part on the angle of entry of a fatal bullet wound, and introduced a crusty (actually gout-ridden) New York police detective, Ebenezer Gryce, who would become her favored hero or, perhaps, anti-hero. While her husband (Charles Rohifs) morphed into a career as a successful interior decorator (after appearing as the lead in one of her dramatizations), Anna Green kept on writing until her last (The Step on the Stair) appeared in 1923. You may never have heard of her (I hadn’t), but Anna Green was well known in her time (for instance by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie). If you want something chilling to read while digesting your holiday turkey, a couple of her works are back in print and almost all are available at Project Gutenberg and in e-book editions, including a couple of Kindle freebies. ©

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We are sure that weaver birds weave your initials in their nests and that swifts perform parabolas in the sky in your honor. From the citation for Salim Ali’s award of the Getty Prize for Conservation, 1976.

The title of Salim Abdul Ali’s autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow, may remind us of his interest in the Bible or in Shakespeare, or both, but it certainly tells of Ali’s obsession with ornithology. Born on November 12, 1896 into a prosperous Muslim family with mining interests, and educated classically (in the western sense) by the Jesuits, Salim Ali had already indicated his preference for avian studies. A tour of duty in the family’s mines did not shake him, and he returned to St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai to study birds. He was also fascinated by motorcycles, particularly Harleys, and these facilitated his not always easy travels across South Asia. That he never earned a degree kept him from formal appointments under the Raj, but his fieldwork made him indispensable to world ornithology, and he (and his eccentricities) became well known to western scientists such as Ernst Mayr, Erwin Streseman, and others. Ali’s disdain for taxonomy and dislike of taking specimens caused his western colleagues more than occasional heartburn, but they all came to depend on his encyclopedic knowledge of Asian birds and bird life. After independence Ali used his pull in the world scientific community and his family connections to influence the Indian government (especially under the Nehrus) to keep funding ornithological research and institutes. Ali lived long enough (to 1987) to be showered with honors from many nations, including honorary doctorates and the Getty Conservation Prize of $100,000, to become known as “the Birdman of India,” and to have several rare species named after him (and one after his wife, who often accompanied him). If you study Asian birds you will find Salim Ali’s avians under the species or variety name “salimali”. ©

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Litigation: A machine you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

It was on November 13 1805 that a Viennese butcher named Johann Georg Lehner loosed his “frankfurter” on the world. Or so it is alleged; but the claim is highly dubious. When all is said and done and slathered in mustard and sauerkraut, the frankfurter is just another sausage, and sausages have been around forever. Almost as soon as humans started killing and cooking animals, they stuffed the intestines with edible bits, salt, and local herbs by way of storage, portability, and, I suppose, for disguise, for some of the bits were quite unmentionable even during the Stone Age. Closer to our own time, the poet Homer cites sausage in The Iliad, and there is an ancient Greek play (by Epichamus) actually entitled The Sausage. (It was a comedy of course. You can’t have a tragedy called “The Sausage.”) Today sausages are important elements of many regional cuisines. In parts of Europe, you know where you are if you know your sausages. In the north of England, a favored sausage is blood pudding, about which enough said (it’s quite good with eggs, very peppery), but the most famous northern England sausage is the Cumberland sausage, heavily herbed and traditionally served with cooked apples. In Cumbria and North Lancashire, every butcher has his (or her) own Cumberland recipe, loyalties are strong, and local vendettas are fought over this or that Cumberland’s claims to supremacy. in southern Bohemia, they have more names for sausage than the Aleuts have for snow, while in in Italy baloney comes mainly from Bologna. So, Johann Georg Lehner, I gladly give you the “first frankfurter” if you absolutely insist, but it’s a pointless concession. As Ms. Gertrude Stein might have said, but didn’t, a sausage is a sausage is a sausage, however you slice it. ©

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The custom of calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom that and colored men Sambo and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was “anniversary noted” in 2009 but gets a repeat as it’s her bicentenary. Born in upstate New York on November 14, 1815, into a well-connected Federalist family, Elizabeth proved equal to the demanding tasks of daughter-hood, wife-hood, and mother-hood and made equality the enduring theme of her long life. Equality in education, for her precocity brought her mastery in Greek, Latin, mathematics, theology, and law. Her studies in the law taught her the costs of legal inequality, so she demanded equal treatment from her lawyer husband, Henry Stanton, beginning with the removal of the promise to obey from her wedding vows and continuing to her commitment to family planning and her frank avowal of her absolute right to consensual sex. Childhood sympathy for the unequal life of her father’s slave (slavery was not abolished in New York until 1827). and fellow feeling for any human oppressed by social norms and legal structures led her (with her husband) into the abolitionist camp and to friendships with (inter alia) Frederick Douglass, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Grimké sisters. And she was a temperance advocate and (as a medical reformer) a strong supporter of homeopathic practice. But without any doubt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton is best known as the author of the “Declaration of Sentiments” at our first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY, where on July 4, 1848, the assembled delegates agreed to the self-evident truths that men and women are endowed equally and inalienably with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that they shared equally in their powers of consent. Happy 200th birthday!!! ©

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But rose, if you are brilliant . . . your thorns are the best part of you. Marianne Moore.

Calvinism’s imaginative power was noted in a critical tradition that linked it to the rise of the literature of introspection or (for lack of a better word) character. It’s not a universal view, but two modern writers have literally embodied the connection in their lifelong commitment to Calvinism, to its creative tension between anxiety and promise, and to the institutional churches that most clearly profess it. They are the novelist Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943) and the poet Marianne Moore (born on November 15, 1887). Robinson was born a Presbyterian and has migrated to the Congregationalists (today she worships with an Iowa City congregation when she’s not chatting with President Obama), while Moore, granddaughter of a Presbyterian minister in Kirkwood, MO, stuck with that communion for life. That life took her first to the Indian School at Carlisle, PA, then to Bryn Mawr College, and then to a literary career centered on New York City and Greenwich Village. A political conservative, she eclectically gathered a roster of friends that, over her span of years, would include Ezra Pound, Alan Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens, Muhammad Ali, and Elizabeth Bishop, take in the whole of the Brooklyn Dodgers and then, when the Bums abandoned New York, the once-hated Yankees (Moore opened the 1968 season at Yankee Stadium and among her treasured possessions was a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle). Meanwhile Marianne Moore garnered just about every award going, including the Pulitzer in 1951, and her Kirkwood connection earned her a star in St. Louis’s Walk of Fame. But she was Presbyterian to the end. Her very favorite poem, she said, was the Book of Job. ©

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I understand your new play is full of single entendres. George Kaufman.

George S. Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh on November 16, 1889, and followed in his father Joseph’s footsteps as a sadly unsuccessful salesman. Soon, however, George gave up selling silk ribbons to became a critic, director, and playwright. His first play, staged during the 1918 flu epidemic, was not a success, but in every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958, there was a play written or directed by George S. Kaufman. But in this amazing run, only one play was Kaufman’s alone. George Kaufman was, par excellence, a collaborator, with just about everybody and despite his caustic wit (when in 1961 Moss Hart delivered the eulogy at Kaufman’s funeral he kept it to five minutes because he worried that George would descend from on high to tell him to cut the crap.) Besides Hart, Kaufman worked with Bolton, Wodehouse, Connelly, Lardner, Ferber, Berlin, Hecht, Cohan, Rodgers, Hart, Parker, Steinbeck, latterly Peter Ustinov and, as they say, others. Still, his hand in these partnerships was evident enough to cop two personal Pulitzers (for Of Thee I Sing, 1932, and You Can’t Take It With You, 1937) and to attract (and, better yet, hold) the attention of the Marx brothers, whose Cocoanuts (1925), Animal Crackers (1928), and A Night at the Opera (1937) profited from Kaufman’s tough love and made the irreverent Groucho regard George as “God”. Kaufman’s most famous collaboration, though, was with Moss Hart on The Man Who Came To Dinner (1939), an acerbic comedy about an artistic egotist (yet another Kaufman collaborator, Alexander Woollcott) that enjoyed a long Broadway run, a famous movie treatment (1942), and an off-Broadway revival starring Woollcott himself and Harpo Marx, also lampooned in the play. ©

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Dogs are perfect soldiers. They are brave and smart; they can smell through walls, see in the dark, and eat rations without complaint. Susan Orleans.

In 1795, France’s revolutionary army announced a prize competition. Provisioning an army was a difficult matter, creating tension between the military and any civilian population (hostile or friendly), and so the comrades would provide 12,000 Ff, cash, for anyone who might figure out how to stop food (organic material) from rotting or, worse, poisoning the troops. That sounded a good deal to Nicolas Appert who, as a confectioner-chef, was accustomed to using heat to create some of his concoctions, and he set to work. 15 years on, in 1810, La république had become L’empire and the Directory had morphed into Napoléon Bonaparte I, but when Appert presented his method he got his reward. But there was some idealism left. Nicolas could have his money if he made his method available to all. So he did, and well before pasteurization we had sterilized, “canned” provisions. Indeed it’s still occasionally called “appertisation”, but Nicolas, born in the Marne district on November 17, 1749, could only think of a modified wine bottle as a container. The food (and he tried almost all foods) was cut and minimally prepared, packed in a wide-necked bottle, sealed and then the life was boiled out of it. Literally. Knowing nothing of bacteria, Nicolas used way more heat and more time than was needed for sterilization, and he lacked the perfect vehicle for his overcooked rations, the tin can. It had already been invented but modern methods of manufacture and vacuum-sealing awaited an American invention of 1849, just in time for another war. Meanwhile, Nicolas’s invention was judged worth its salt by the generals, who no doubt continued to eat well at HQ while the poor bloody infantry supped safely out of Appert’s bottles. ©

[Stanley]

We are all ladies and gentlemen working together here, and we'll all come in through the front door. Rose Knox, on her first day as CEO of Knox Gelatin, 1908.

One of the things you might not know about Johnstown, NY, was that in the 19th century it was the center of New York’s leather goods industries, with no fewer than four tanneries inside the town. So when Charles Knox got the idea that his new bride’s ingenious methods of making and using gelatin might be a winner, he and Rose moved to Johnstown to go into gelatin big time. They were partners in every way, management, research, sales, and parenting their kids, and there’s no doubt that Rose’s gelatin expertises (and her recipes) were the Knox Company’s driving engines. So when Charles died in 1908, Rose took over the whole show and then expanded it. Rose Markham Knox, born in Mansfield, Ohio on November 18, 1857 would become one of America’s leading business persons, and was always intent on putting her Republican and Presbyterian values to work in the Knox Gelatin Company. One of her first acts was to fire a manager who had said he could never work for a woman, thus proving his point, and she quickly established a five-day week—with two weeks’ paid vacation—for all her workers, along with a generous pension fund. She expanded the business, too, through advertising (including a “Mrs. Knox Says” syndicated column of cooking advice, big on gelatin) and acquisition of rivals, always extending workers’ benefits. Come the Great Depression, the Knox Company, then the country’s biggest manufacturer and vendor of gelatin (for home and industrial use) kept on all its workers and (to compete with Jell-O) expanded into flavored gelatins. Rose Knox, who in her old age looked exactly like Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple, turned the business over to her son in 1947 to take a well-earned rest. Knox and Jell-O are today both owned by Kraft Foods. ©

[Stanley]

I don't know any more about theology than a jack-rabbit knows about ping pong, but I'm on my way to glory. Billy Sunday.

Modern Christian fundamentalism, Lutheran scholar Martin Marty tells us, is quite different from the aggressive biblicism of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation rode the intellectual crest of renaissance humanism and then easily breasted the torrents of the Enlightenment. Isaac Newton was a biblicist, and it’s arguable that modern science itself was birthed by the Reformation. But in several works, notably The Irony of It All and his ongoing Fundamentalism Project, Marty sees a different spirit abroad, arguing that Fundamentalism tends to reject science, indeed to reject the modern, to be impatient with complexity, to believe in the singularity of its truths, and in these characters—and its social and moral “tribalism”—to share many traits with (e.g.) Islamic fundamentalism. One of Marty’s favorite fundamentalists is William Ashley “Billy” Sunday, born near Ames, Iowa, on November 19, 1862, to poor German immigrants once called “Sonntag”. But Sunday did not hit the sawdust trail to make money. Indeed, he quit a promising baseball career in midstream (he was making a cool $150,000 in modern $$$) to take up cudgels for Christ, and at first his success was counted only in the conversion of souls. That might have been enough for Billy Sunday, but not for his wife Nell, who soon took over the business end of the enterprise and turned Billy’s Bible into good business. In his prosperous heyday, Billy Sunday was the guest of presidents and governors, a man whose views on most things modern—although perhaps not theology—were sought out and avidly reported by the national and religious presses. Billy kept going long after his doctors told him to stop, and succumbed to a heart attack while on yet another crusade, in 1935. ©

[Tripps]

Thanks for that now I know who he was.
Or as Mr Sinatra said -

Chicago, Chicago
That toddlin' town
Chicago, Chicago
I'll show you around
I love it
Bet your bottom dollar you'll lose the blues
In Chicago, Chicago
The town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down
On State Street that great street I just want to say
They do things they don't do on Broadway
They have a time, the time of their life
I saw a man who danced with his wife
In Chicago, Chicago my hometown

[Stanley]

Nice one David, I've passed it on to Uncle Bob.....

The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new. Nadine Gordimer.

Nadine Gordimer chronicled life in South Africa’s apartheid regime. Her main vehicle was fiction, fifteen novels and over two hundred short stories, but as she said “nothing that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.” For these truths, for “her magnificent epic . . . of very great benefit to humanity”, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Born on November 20, 1923, in a small mining town in the East Rand (near Johannesburg), this second-generation immigrant had first to liberate herself from her mother’s protective embrace, and indeed her mother’s unhappinesses provided Gordimer with another unfreedom to chronicle. But Hannah Gordimer was also an example, concerned enough with the cruelties of racism to establish her own free crèche for black children, a kindness that won her the unkind attentions of the South African police. Perhaps this helps to explain how it was that Nadine’s first published stories (in 1937 and 1938!!) were about children. Gordimer first came to international attention in 1951 with a story in The New Yorker, and indeed her short fiction was more important to her (‘the art form of our age’) and should, it is said, be read first. What is thought to be her finest novel, The Conservationist, won the Booker Prize in 1974. When she heard of her Nobel award, Gordimer said “Mandela still can’t vote,” but she lived long enough to see her friend as President of the Republic and then, after his retirement, to turn her truthful gaze on the flawed presidency of Jacob Zuma. A woman who was, physically, “absurdly small” and apparently frail, Nadine Gordimer needed no protection but did enjoy a courageous life, a “wonderful marriage” and was, as we might expect, a liberating mother. ©

[Stanley]

Glad to be of service. I had completely forgotten the lyric but once upon a time I knew it well. So thanks to you, too.

Bob

[Stanley]

There is a reference in Aristotle to a gnat produced by larvae engendered in the slime of vinegar. Alfred Henry Sturtevant.

In the early 1800s there went out from New Haven young ministers whose mission was to keep westward-bound New Englanders faithful to Congregationalism. This “Yale Band” enjoyed several successes, among them the spread of anti-slavery and, at a stretch, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. They also founded many colleges, including Illinois College in Jacksonville IL whose founder the Reverend Julian Sturtevant also birthed a small dynasty of intellectual achievers. These included his mathematician son, Alfred, and his son, also named Alfred, a pioneering geneticist. This Alfred Sturtevant, born in Jacksonville on November 21, 1891, moved to Cal Tech in 1928, and there with the likes of Theodosius Dobzhansky and George Beadle would help to construct the “modern synthesis” of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. Alfred began (as quite a young child) by trying to create biological/historical pedigrees for his father’s horses, at which he enjoyed some success, but at Columbia (and then Cal Tech) he switched to our old hero, mentioned before in these notes, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a small bug (quite irritating when found in one’s kitchen) whose generations proceed rapidly enough to trace its inheritances on a nearly evolutionary scale. Using Drosophila’s fecundity and his own grey matter, Sturtevant in mapped the fly’s genome-chromosome linkages, a remarkable intellectual feat after which it only remained for Crick and Watson to give us DNA’s actual molecular structure. And on it went. Two of Alfred’s students would win Nobels, and his son William may be said to have completed the Yale Band circle with his New Haven PhD in ethnology and his distinguished career of mapping the migrations of Native Americans. ©