BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, a republic of letters where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. Andrew Carnegie.

The DesMarias sisters (Varina was my first doctor, Lillian a librarian at my dad’s university for several years) had an agreement. Their wills set up a trust, the beneficiary to be determined by the surviving sister. It was a sort of tontine, and I don’t think anyone knew about it other than Lillian, Varina, and their lawyer. Born poor, both lived frugal lives, and healthy ones too, but Lillian in her early 90s grew quite frail, and ill, and everyone thought she would go first. Varina brought Lillian back home to Grundy Center, IA, and put her in a nursing home. But Varina died suddenly in early 2010, and so in 2012 the headline news read, “$8 Million bequest goes to Chillicothe Public Library.” Actually it was a tidy bit more than $8 million, and it all went to the Livingston County (MO) library system. Lillian’s last job (1970-1980: she was born in 1913) had been as that county’s library director. The news came as a pleasant shock to the library’s director and staff, who rushed to remember Lillian fondly and underline her lifetime devotion to spreading knowledge and literacy. I thought of the DesMarias sisters today because it was on March 12, 1901, that Andrew Carnegie (also born poor and a remarkably thrifty chap) made his biggest single library endowment, $5.2 million to the New York Public Library on condition that it became a library system for the whole city, all five county boroughs. Of course back then a dollar went a long way (Carnegie’s gift would total over $180 million today), but then being an iron and steel magnate is more profitable than being a country doctor or a county librarian. But the point Andrew and Lillian wanted to make (and Varina too) was the same. And March 12 seems like a good day to honor it. Go out and read a book. ©

[Stanley]

It is not given to every electrician to die in so glorious a manner. Joseph Priestley, commenting on the death of G W. Richman, hit by lightning.

The tendency in “reformed” Protestantism to draw sharp separations between sacred and secular helped to fuel the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th centuries, and there were many devout Protestants (e.g. Isaac Newton) who saw nothing sacrilegious in seeing nature as a mechanism and studying it empirically and experimentally. This came to its fullest fruition in the career of Joseph Priestley, born in Yorkshire on March 13, 1733. Not only was Priestley a clergyman and a scientist, but he accepted David Hume’s materialist philosophy and extended it to explain everything in the universe, including the human mind. Yet Priestley continued to insist on the existence of the soul and to believe in a benevolent God whose creation would (deterministically) move us all along the road to perfection. Our task was to understand it, and to that task Priestley devoted his life. It would involve him in scientific proofs of Christian moral principles, a pioneering study of English grammar, interesting reflections on education (how and why we learn, how best to teach), creative work in political philosophy, and theological studies which led some to credit him as the founder of modern Unitarianism. In science, Priestley is best known for his writings on electricity (he was a Franklin enthusiast) and his experiments with (and isolation of) oxygen. Among the ironies of Priestley’s life were his total rejection of Calvinism (he found his determinism elsewhere) and his invention of that most wonderful accompaniment for whisky, soda water. But it was his political radicalism that forced him to flee Britain during the French Revolutionary Wars. In Pennsylvania, Priestley continued his eccentric ways in religion, science, and politics until he died in 1804. ©

[Stanley]

The beauty of this extensive valley contrasts well with the rolling mountains . . . and at this hour of twilight was enchanting. Journal of Narcissa Whiitman, Summer 1837.

In the 1830s, my ancestors started giving their children classical names (Horace) instead of the biblical names (e,g, Nehemiah) that had been New England practice. They were good Whigs, (also naming one of their boys William Henry Harrison Bliss), but they were beaten to it by the Prentiss family, who named their third child Narcissa. So I’ll guess that Judge Stephen Prentiss, her father, was a Federalist. Narcissa Prentiss was born on March 14, 1808, in Plattsburgh, NY, at about the right time for her, as an adolescent, to have been swept up in the religious enthusiasms of the Second Great Awakening. Meanwhile, Marcus Whitman had always wanted to be a minister but couldn’t afford the education, so became a doctor instead. Before he met Narcissa, Whitman had applied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who first turned him down and then decided that a medical missionary would be a good idea. Since Narcissa wanted to be a missionary, that was perfect, so the couple married in 1836 and set off for the Oregon country. It was a difficult journey, in a seven-wagon train led by the fur trader Milton Sublette (and Narcissa was pregnant), but they were well settled on the Walla Walla River by Spring 1837. There they established a famous mission, and school, and adopted eleven children, and there they were massacred by their Cayuse Indian charges in 1847. The Cayuse thought the Whitmans had brought smallpox among them. Back in the USA, the most popular theory was that the massacre had been got up by Jesuit priests. Actually John Baptiste Brouillet, SJ, saved some of the mission settlers and helped to bury the Whitmans, but as we know today religious prejudice makes for powerful political propaganda. ©

[Stanley]

Each of my houses is an entity, with its own equipment and staff for that particular environment. Marjorie Merriwether Post.

Marjorie Merriwether Post chalked up several impressive accomplishments during her life, but one that is not so often mentioned is the number of marriages she and her three daughters (including actress Dina Merrill) entered into, and left: between them, the four women married and divorced 17 times. Marjorie Post herself accounted for four, and two of them helped her manage the source of her fortune, the Postum Cereal Company (makers of my grandmother’s favorite morning drink). Majorie Post was born on March 15, 1887. Her father, C. W. Post, who founded the company, died in 1914, and Marjorie became sole owner. She was already married to banker Edward Close (via a second marriage, Close was the grandfather of actress Glenn Close), and there’s no doubt that he helped her establish a degree of control over the company. That control continued throughout a busy life, the particular busy-ness often determined by which husband she was with. With financier Edward Hutton, for instance, she developed Birdseye Frozen Foods, merged it with Postum, and became Chairman of the Board of General Foods Corporation in 1929. Her longest marriage (1935-55) was with Joseph Davies, and that took her to Moscow (he was US ambassador there in the 30s) where she amassed a considerable collection of Russian art. Then it was back to Long Island where she became benefactress of what would become Long Island University. It was then C. W. Post College, and there Marjorie became housemother to a fraternity (she called the members her “boys” or, sometimes, her “sons-in-law”). Through it all, Post became and remained the richest woman in America, and her philanthropies (including the Boy Scouts of America) were almost as astonishing as her private luxuries. ©

[Stanley]

She whom the moon ruled/ like us/ riding the polished lenses into the night sky. Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium", remembering Caroline Herschel.

Stories of individuals surmounting all obstacles are always remarkable, but few can be as remarkable as that of Caroline Lucretia Herschel, born in Hanover on March 16, 1750, the eighth child of talented but poor parents, and (of course) a female in a man’s world. If those were handicaps, she added to them with a bout of childhood typhus that left her body dwarfed and bent. Her mother thought the best she could expect was a lifetime in service, and set about to train Caroline to sew, tat, and cook. Her father, an oboist in Hanover’s military band, thought otherwise, and included her in her brother William’s lessons, mainly in music. William and Caroline developed a close relationship, and she followed him to England to assist him in his music career, and then continued to assist him as his interests turned to astronomy, first as a hobby and then as his consuming and distinguishing interest. By 1782 William was famous as royal astronomer to King George III, and Caroline had become much more than the constant recorder of William’s observations: an astronomer in her own right, she had by 1787 discovered multiple comets and two astronomical objects we now recognize as separate galaxies. So the king granted Caroline an annual pension, not a large one but making her the first woman to be paid for her scientific work. She went on to many accomplishments, including a massive Catalogue of Stars for the Royal Society in 1798 and (after William’s death in 1822 and her return to Hanover) mapping hundreds of ‘nebulae' for future study, an incredible output. Caroline Herschel continued her astronomy into her very old age (she died in 1848), honored by kings, princes, and scientific societies, and admired by those who like to hear about people who beat the odds. ©

[Stanley]

What's the use of being Irish if the world doesn't break your heart? John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy’s grandfathers, Patrick Kennedy (b. 1858) and “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (b. 1863), felt the sting of being Irish in the home town of American Brahmanism. His grandmothers, both Marys, felt it even more, and there’s no doubt that his father Joseph (b. 1888) nursed those old resentments all his life. Still, at some point in Boston’s history it clearly became OK to be Irish. In 1907 Joe Kennedy himself benefitted from Charles Eliot Norton’s view that Harvard needed badly to recruit boys from the block, and in due course old Joe's sons followed him. By the time John F. strolled into Harvard Yard, in September 1936, you could be Irish and belong to most of the elite campus clubs. But if you wanted a single date when Boston’s best people accepted that Irish was OK, you could do worse than St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1922, when that holy of holies, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Pierre Monteux conducting), had an Irish night. The centerpiece of this Gaelic extravaganza was the world première of “Five Irish Fantasies,” poems of William Butler Yeats set to music and sung by none other than John McCormack, still at the height of his fame as “the” Irish tenor, world-renowned star of the concert stage and grand opera, Irish-born and, oh yes, by March 17, 1922, McCormack was a naturalized American citizen and soon to become really “at home” in America by building one of Hollywood’s more lavish mansions. It is not recorded whether Joseph Kennedy was ever a guest there (with Gloria Swanson?), but on St. Patrick’s Day 1922 let’s hope the whole Kennedy clan was in Boston’s Symphony Hall to hear John McCormack sing an Irish fantasia on W. B. Yeats’s poetry.©

[Stanley]

I soon found that I could not be one of the smartest people in the world, so I worked instead at being creative. Wesley Buchele, interview, 2015.

A great northern victory of the Civil War was “An Act Donating Public Lands . . . [to] provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.” Better known as the Morrill Act (1862), it had been opposed by southerners, but slave state secession in 1861 cleared the way. The “land grant colleges” are the embodiment of an ideal that public resources should be invested in higher education. To that was added the notion that there should be a payback, and thus the land grants not only educate the public but focus research and service activities on areas that will benefit the common weal. There can be few land grant professors who have furthered this mission as effectively as has Wesley Buchele, born in Kansas on March 18, 1920 and still (as far as I know) going strong. Down on his family farm, Wesley worked hard in the hot sun and vowed to find ways to make that work easier, more productive, and safer. His degrees (at a land grant college) in agricultural engineering took him first to war service, then to the John Deere works in Waterloo, Iowa, and finally to the faculty at another land grant college, Iowa State, where he was responsible for a number of inventions, the most notable of which now litters world farmscapes with those giant round bales of hay and straw. Less dramatically, he made farm machinery safer, invented clever, cheap methods for testing soil, developed more efficient planters and threshers, and concocted a device that calibrates the cutting angle of a plow in relation to the speed of the tractor. In his spare time, Buchele campaigned for more sustainable methods of cultivation. And, as he went along, he assigned his patents (all 23 of them) and his profits to the Iowa State University Research Foundation. His land grant salary was enough, he thought. ©

[Stanley]

Through her the splendor of life was uncovered for me and the road of wonder began widening. Gaston Lachaise.

Gaston Lachaise, a naturalized US citizen, became one of our leading sculptors, and one can’t look long at his catalogue without asking “who is she?” ‘She’ being his characteristic female nude. Of course one understands that a sculptor may use many models, and modernism gave a certain license to play around with abstractions, but even so there is something quite individual about Lachaise nudes, about which the word “statuesque” might have been coined, for they are larger than life. But there seems also to be something erotic about them, harking back perhaps to stone age fertility charms rendered in the female form. And it doesn’t take much digging to find out that, indeed, Gaston Lachaise had a muse, and a model, and a lover, and she was the very singular Isabel Dutaud Nagle, a wealthy American of French Canadian extraction, who came to Paris in 1903 to see to the education of her young son and learn something about French art. Lachaise, born only in 1882, on March 19, was still learning his sculpture, developing a style, and to shorten what was undoubtedly a longer story Isabel swept Gaston right off his feet. And, one guesses, vice versa. The older Isabel, really quite a beautiful woman, was soon modeling for Lachaise on the beach (in photos) and in his studio (for sculpture), and soon they had plighted their troth. Soon Isabel went back to Boston and waited. Gaston, poor as a churchmouse, had to find paid work to be able to follow Isabel back to America, but (after a year’s military service) he put off sculpting and went to work for René Lalique to earn his passage money. In due course he arrived in Boston, and the romance, and the modeling, recommenced. Soon they moved to New York City and married. And the petite bride, all 5’2” and 105 pounds of her, looked absolutely lovely ©

[Stanley]

The man who . . . is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose iron smelting for his occupation is rarely able to understand the science of handling pig-iron. Frederick W. Taylor.

Growing up, one of my favorite books was Cheaper by the Dozen, a mostly true story about a large and happy family. I liked it not because my family was small and unhappy, but because the Gilbreths seemed so very distinctive: democratic yet orderly, happy yet serious, nurturing yet competitive. Frank Bunker Gilbreth was born poor in 1868 and with minimal education transformed himself into a time and motion expert. Lillian, who was ten years younger and would live 38 years longer, was a PhD (psychology) who married Frank in 1904, birthed 12 kids, and helped Frank make their family into a time and motion laboratory. (Tutelage included how best to dry oneself after a bath). Theirs was a great story, not to be ruined by derivative movies, one of them OK (Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, 1950) and the other dreadful (Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, 2003). Little did I know that the Gilbreths’ philosophy of time management (to improve the workplace and make it more pleasant and productive for all) was quite distinctive, and put them at odds with a more famous management scientist, Frederick Taylor. Born on March 20, 1856, Taylor (despite his aristocratic birth), chose to work his way up from the industrial shop floor. In due course he became the founder of “Taylorism,” a much more management-oriented view of efficiency, the aim of which was to reinforce management’s power, contribute more to bottom-line profits than to wages, and render labor unions superfluous and powerless. Taylor and Frank Gilbreth both died before they could clash, but their followers fell out in the 1920s and 1930s and the rift marked an important divide in management science. Perhaps there was something more significant than I thought in that large and happy Gilbreth family. “Cheaper by the dozen” they were indeed, but they shared in the benefits of economies of scale and of efficiency. ©

[Stanley]

Those men are pretenders/ who think/ that they created women/ from one of their ribs. Nizar Qabbani.

The rich diversities of Arab Muslim societies are not much appreciated by the current crop of American presidential contenders and utterly denied by several of them. In centuries past, and more recently, this has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a perilous stupidity. It is also limiting, constricting, and impoverishing. Among many for instances, let’s consider the diplomat and poet Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani, born into the mercantile middle class of Damascus on March 21, 1923, a time when a Syrian boy’s aspirations were crucially governed by his society’s colonial status, for Syria was then still a French colonial mandate. Nevertheless, Qabbani grew up in a pleasant suburb with expanding educational opportunities, first studying science and then the law, graduating from college in 1945, at about exactly the time when the exhaustion of France, the rise of Arab nationalism, and American and United Nations hostility to the old European empires made a political career an attractive proposition. But he had also already become a published poet, and a singular one. His elder sister’s suicide (in protest against an arranged marriage) gave the young Qabbani a poetic vision and a cause to write for. His literary and philosophical feminism was strengthened by his wife’s death in a terrorist attack in Beirut. Meanwhile, he had become a successful diplomat first for Syria and then the United Arab Republic. The failure of that experiment in pan-Arabism, the disastrous wars with Israel, and the realities of western economic imperialism provided Qabbani’s other poetic muses. Out of sympathy with several Arab states, he was an exile for the last 15 years of his life. But at his request, he was buried at the heart of his inspirations and of his complexities, in Damascus. ©

[Stanley]

If I did not think you a good-tempered & truth loving man, I should not tell you that I read your book with more pain than pleasure. Sedgwick to Darwin, 1859.

In the achingly picturesque village of Dent, in the Yorkshire Dales, stands a simple stone memorial to Adam Sedgwick. One travels there to see Dent (and Dentdale), but the memorial stone is worth a thought. Sedgwick, who was born in Dent on March 22, 1785, was one of those precursors of Darwin whose work made Darwin’s great insight conceivable. A stone memorial is appropriate, for Sedgwick, son of an Anglican vicar, would become a leading geologist of the 19th century and (for 55 years) holder of Cambridge’s Woodwardian chair in geology. Dentdale is a great place to study geology (today the “Sedgwick Trail” will bring you face to face with the great Dent Fault), but Sedgwick went off to Cambridge to study math and theology, at which he did brilliantly. He remained something of a theologian all his life, convinced that religious and scientific truths—being “true”—could never be at war. Even so, he found his first view—that the earth’s surface geology was shaped by Noah’s flood—untenable in the face of the evidence he himself collected. His recantation, and acceptance of the uniformitarian views of Charles Lyell, came when he was President of the Geological Society in 1831, and made quite a splash. In that same year, he took on young Charles Darwin as a student, taught him the possibility that the earth was quite an old place, and thus gave Darwin the space and time he would later need to develop his arguments on evolution by natural selection, published in 1859. But if Sedgwick abandoned the Flood and rejected orthodox views on a recent creation, he never retreated from his insistence that speciation had always arisen from the mind of God. “Natural selection” (if it existed at all) could only be a “secondary consequence” of that fact. He remained Darwin’s friend, however, to the end of his life. ©

[Tizer]

My stay in Torbay last week included a study of several geologically notable sites and a visit to Kent's Cavern. Father John MacEnery who lived nearby at Torre Abbey Manor did the first exploration in 1825 and found what appeared to be human fossils, but he was held back by his religious beliefs and was bad at keeping records. William Buckland tried to get him to publish but MacEnery's notes were too muddled and he convinced himself he was wrong. Nothing more happened until 1865-1880 when William Pengelly did a professional exploration and developed the modern methods of archaeology. He showed that that there were flint tools and bones of extinct animals. At that time Charles Darwin stayed in a hotel just around the corner from the cavern and we can deduce that his ideas were influenced by the work going on in Kent's Cavern. LINK

[Stanley]

The beautiful seems right by force of its beauty. Virginia Woolf.

The change to factory production produced its share of rebellions. Some were violent, as working people (e.g. the Luddites) fought the material and moral poverties of repetitive labor timed by the water wheel and the steam piston rather than, say, the daily course of the sun or the worker’s whim. The economic beauties of mass production triumphed, and low-cost, standardized goods flooded the market. Later, the Arts and Crafts movement found similar causes for rebellion, but with a middle-class flavor. They treasured the beauties of hand-designed and hand-wrought work, and produced “arts & crafts” crockery, glass- and silverware, furniture, fabrics, houses, even wallpapers. And books, too: indeed the hand-produced book, on fine paper, with distinctive typefaces, illustrations, and bindings, would have a longer life than most arts & crafts “lines.” William Morris’s Kelmscott Press was the most famous, but there were others: in England alone, the Doves, Ashendene, and Essex House presses all had longish lives. So Leonard Woolf’s idea that his wife’s suicidal depressions might find release in shepherding her writing from brain to bookstore was not as daft as it might sound. And so it was that on March 23, 1917, while the Great War raged, Leonard and Virginia Woolf bought a hand press and had it carted to Hogarth House, their leasehold dwelling in West London. There, later in 1917, they produced its first of over 300 publications, binding together Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall” with Leonard’s “Three Jews.” The Hogarth Press did not, we know from hindsight, save Virginia Woolf from her demons, but it saved her from dealing with her printer stepbrothers and the grisly memories that she associated with them. ©

[Stanley]

She is handsomer than ever I saw her, and not in the least abashed. A gentleman friend reporting on Lady Di Spencer shortly after her divorce from Viscount Bolingbroke.

Diana has been the name of more than one woman in the Spencer line, the first of them a true goddess of the hunt. This very first Lady Diana Spencer was born (on March 24, 1734) not at Blenheim but at Langley Park in Buckinghamshire where her father, the third duke of Marlborough, preferred to live. There and at Blenheim she enjoyed a happy and rather indulged childhood, supplied with the best of tutors including the portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose style Lady Di (as she was always called) affected in a long life as a not-quite-so-good painter. In Diana’s other life she married a dissolute aristocrat, Frederick St. John, second Viscount Bolingbroke, for whom she bore two sons and from whom she experienced much loneliness. Bolingbroke was chiefly famed as a gambler, drinker, racehorse owner, and philanderer. In those days it was hard for a woman to get a divorce, so Lady Diana took up with one Mr. Topham Beauclerk, a well-connected gentleman in the sense that he was a wrong-side-of-the-blanket descendant of King Charles II (and the beautiful Nell Gwyn). So Viscount Bolingbroke sued her for divorce (much in the manner, James Boswell said, of a pot blacking a kettle), and Lady Diana married Beauclerk, bore him three children, went on painting, turned to excellent book illustrations, and became great friends with some of the best men of the age, including Boswell, his Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, Edward Gibbon, and the very sober Josiah Wedgwood (for whose very fine ceramics Diana did some very fine designs). So for this particular Lady Di Spencer there was a happy ending, despite the notorious slovenliness of her second husband (there was much humorous but informed speculation about the number of vermin Beauclerk carried around in his wig.) ©

[Stanley]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection First lines of Howl, Alan Ginsberg.

Senators should (as President Obama does) realize that you cannot depend on a judge’s past profile for his or her future decisions. For every safe Sam Alito there will be a joker in the pack. When Dwight Eisenhower nominated Governor Earl Warren to be Chief Justice, he seemed well within the bounds of the conservative political sensibility that nominated Brownell for Treasury, Dulles for State, and Wilson for Defense. Warren turned out differently. And other judges’ pasts have failed to predict their judicial futures. One of my favorites arose when, on March 25, 1957, United States Customs agents seized 520 copies of Alan Ginsberg’s now famous Howl. Ginsberg saw the poem as a “lament for the Lamb in America” but San Francisco’s county attorney disagreed, and the case came before a municipal court judge, Clayton W. Horn, who in real life was a respectable, conservative gentleman who taught youth Sunday School in his church. Ginsberg’s friends (e.g. Kerouac and Ferlinghetti), facing this Babbitt on the bench, packed the court and disrupted its proceedings, cheering or booing as seemed appropriate and occasionally reciting their own outrageous writings. But the conservative Judge Horn disappointed them. The poem, he judged, was not without social merit, but there was for him a more critical question. “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms? An author should be real in treating his subject and . . . express his thoughts in his own words.” Thus Ginsberg went free, very possibly a disappointed martyr. Before they permanently make the judiciary into a political playground, our senators might recall the strange case of Clayton Horn and Alan Ginsberg. ©

[Stanley]

Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us. Edward Bellamy.

It is said that the USA today is reminiscent of the USA of the late 19th century. Back then, ‘robber barons’ consolidated their profits and power by fair means and foul; most did not share the proceeds with their employees. Many saw the US Senate as a millionaire’s club, and some senators were certainly bought and paid for, whether by the Rock Island Railroad or the Sugar Trust. State legislatures north and south hurried to share the graft, spawning corruption stories both legendary and true. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the 14th amendment which, justices said, did not protect black people from discrimination by state and local law (as long as the discrimination was “equal”), while they claimed that the very same amendment did protect corporations from regulation. This was judicial lawmaking at its most brazen. Protests there were, for instance violent strikes in steel, coal, and railways, but employers counted on the National Guard and the courts (and private armies) to help them beat the strikes. There were literary protests, too, for instance Thorsten Veblen’s witty Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Another was a utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by the Christian Socialist (and Baptist layman) Edward Bellamy. Bellamy, born in Massachusetts on March 25, 1850, practiced journalism for a while but illness turned him to fiction. Looking Backward, published in 1888, was a runaway best seller (in the 19th century, only Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold better), spawned a legion of socialist and nationalist clubs, and, together with the strikes and the rise of the People’s Party, scared plutocrats almost out of their wits. Arguably, Bellamy’s fictional manifesto bore fruit in the ‘progressive’ reforms of the next century. But the author died of TB in 1898, leaving his brother Francis to craft the Pledge of Allegiance. ©

[Stanley]

In 1957, the skin colors were part of the choreography. Balanchine saw what was going to happen in the world and put it on stage. George Mitchell, on his role in the ballet Agon.

Given the statistics of incarceration, a reasonable hypothesis would be that the criminal justice system is an integral element of American racism. But whether or not the hypothesis stands scrutiny, it is not unusual for African American children to have a dad in jail. And so it was in 1946 that Arthur Mitchell, as eldest child, became his family’s breadwinner. Mitchell was also “normal” in that while he delivered groceries and newspapers and shined shoes, he became a gang member. Born in Harlem on March 27, 1934, in the Great Depression, Mitchell might not have expected any better, but a school guidance counselor spotted an unusual talent and encouraged the boy to apply to the High School of the Performing Arts. He knocked them dead there and in 1952 went on a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. By 1956 Mitchell was appointed principal dancer and the school’s sponsoring company, the New York City Ballet. This speedy ascent suggests a remarkable talent, but also a breaking of barriers. Indeed he did that, too, for instance his co-starring with the white ballerina Diana Adams in George Balanchine’s Agon (1957). Mitchell and Adams performed their roles to great acclaim in New York and around Europe, but in America southern stations kept their interracial pas de deux off the national networks until 1965. Mitchell’s sense of exclusion and the assassination of M. L. King, Jr. sent him back to Harlem where, in 1969 and with his own money, he established the Dance Theatre of Harlem. The DTH quickly attracted talent from Harlem and foundation support from downtown and in 2006 the company performed in George Bush’s White House at a dinner honoring Arthur Mitchell who, weighed down with honors and awards, is still its Director Emeritus. ©

[Stanley]

I have known very little personal love, but the public has always shown me great affection. Flora Robson.

Beauty in some currently conventional sense has long been important for actresses, not as a minimal qualification for success on stage or screen but as one for stardom. And it’s been that way for a long time, witness early stage beauties like Nell Gwynn or Susannah Cibber. There have been exceptions of course, and these exceptions have risen to the top more frequently in Europe than in America. One very successful British actress, by her own estimation long-faced and big-nosed, was Flora Robson. Born into a seafaring family in South Shields on March 28, 1902, Robson’s father, a ship engineer, noticed and took pride in his little girl’s skill at dramatic and poetic recitations, and when the family moved to London helped her get into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Robson was a success in drama school but not in her early career, and at one point she signed on as a social worker in a canning factory (where she taught women workers how to act). Stage roles came first, in the early 1930s, and Robson remained a theatre person until age and health made her prefer films. But she was early on a cinema star, too, most famously as Queen Elizabeth (the first one) in Fire Over England (1936). Robson’s professional longevity spoke of a profound versatility of genre and part. Perhaps it was her plainness of face that helped her to develop great roles on stage or in films, in comedy as well as in drama, in support or as the lead, and over a very long career that saw her act in 60 films and well over 100 plays. In the end, family won out. After a superb Miss Prism in a 1975 stage farewell, Dame Flora Robson retired to seaside Brighton to live with her sisters Margaret and Sheila. In their company, she died in July 1984. ©

[Stanley]

I pray for my family every night. Clara May Bliss

Clara May Simms Bliss was born at home on March 29, 1916, 100 years ago today, and died 94 years later, at home again as she had hoped, although at her last she was at home in the care of her daughter and son-in-law. At her birth, home was a big white house on a rise of ground (“Kerr Hill”) at the edge of Grundy Center, IA, built in 1881 by her grandfather Daniel Kerr, town founder, Scottish immigrant, Civil War veteran, and legislator in Springfield, Des Moines, and Washington DC. Her parents were elderly, indulgent, and rather distant (they called each other Mr. and Mrs. Simms), and Clara May had a pleasant, active childhood during which she learned to play badminton and basketball (she went to the state tournament in 1934), and to shop. We all remember the shopping, and when we cleaned out her house (in Des Moines) we found many sale bargains (clothes for grandchildren, gadgets, tinned hams, baked beans) squirreled away for a rainy day or a birthday, then forgotten. She loved antiques, too, an amour that’s rattled down to her grandchildren. Clara May was religious, political, and familial, born into rock-ribbed Republicanism of the radical sort, and when the party chose Goldwater she (impressed by Lyndon Johnson, with whom she’d dined in 1960) jumped the GOP ship forever, sending all her first cousins a long letter proving (with quotes) that old Daniel would be ashamed of them for supporting the upstart from Arizona. Religion was hers too, and although Bible study led her to reject some orthodoxies (e.g. eternal life) she believed herself to be an utterly faithful Presbyterian and was disappointed at the backsliding of her children. But she was forever pleased that dogwood and redbud trees blossomed on her birthday, and at Clara May’s century, yet again, they have been right on time.©

[Stanley]

All the world's a stage, and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. Sean O'Casey.

Irish nationalism in its complex 20th-century strains had a love-hate relationship with the best Irish writers. Its Gaelic wing’s rural romanticism could be difficult to swallow especially when in its puritanical mood. Its sanctifications of martyrdom repelled some. Its apparent rejection of its historic Protestant wing could smell of the censor and of a rigidifying Catholic orthodoxy. Its dominant political strain had no sympathy for working-class socialism. For one reason or another, at one time or several, Irish authors who were by no stretch friends of English imperialism fell out with Irish Republicanism. One who had a particularly ambiguous time of it was playwright Sean O’Casey. Born on March 30, 1880, O’Casey’s pen name was itself a statement of his strong nationalist sympathies, for he had been born and baptized a Dublin Protestant, John Casey, part of a large family struggling to make ends meet. However, his first plays’ depictions of Irish masculinity, Irish patriotism, and Irish sex were thought irreverent, tragicomic where tragedy was called for, disrespectful of the Easter Rising’s martyrs, morally unsound. A near riot took place at the Abbey Theatre opening of The Plough and the Stars (1926), not stilled by W. B. Yeats walking on stage to chastise the audience for “shaming themselves.” It was thus that Sean O’Casey went to London, met and married his life partner Eileen Carey, and thereafter visited Ireland only for the Guinness and the mist. Ironically, O’Casey’s particular sort of Irish nationalism went down best in London’s West End, on Broadway, and in John Ford’s Hollywood. Ornery to the end, in the 1960s O’Casey declined both an OBE from the Queen and an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin. I myself have not forgiven him for disliking P. G. Wodehouse. ©

[Stanley]

The woman who was (probably) Geoffrey Chaucer's "Alceste" in "The Legend of Good Women"

We don’t usually know the exact birthdate of medieval folk, but of Phillippa of Lancaster we can say it was March 31, 1360. It helped in this regard that Phillippa was John of Gaunt’s daughter and the sister of the future King Henry IV. (Her father had many properties and she was not born in Lancaster’s but in Leicester’s castle). Phillippa’s life was notable for several reasons, not least for her learning (she read the Greek and Latin classics and was well-versed in theology) and her tutors who included Geoffrey Chaucer, Jean Froissart, and John Wycliffe. All this may have been in preparation for marriage, but if so it was not until Valentine’s Day 1387 that Phillippa was wed, by proxy, to Portugal’s King John I. Husband and wife met eleven days later. Thus, incidentally, was born England’s oldest alliance, still of some force as late as World War II and at least mentioned in the 1989 “treaty” between the universities of Lisbon and Lancaster; more to the point of this story Phillippa carried to the Portuguese court her disapproval of her father’s amours, and after her arrival she sent John I’s mistress to a nunnery. But Phillippa was too smart to be vengeful; under her royal patronage Inēs Peres rose to be prioress while her children were legitimized and lived with honor at court. Phillippa was by all accounts a most successful queen consort, producing six children who survived infancy to become important figures in their own right, including King Edward the Eloquent, Prince Henry the Navigator, and Queen Isabella of Burgundy. Columbus’s Queen Isabella was Phillippa’s great-granddaughter. Thus it was that Phillippa of Lancaster is known in Portuguese history as the mother of the “Illustrious Generation.” ©

[Stanley]

We have a pretty witty king/ Whose word no man relies on;/ He never said a foolish thing/ Nor ever did a wise one. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in a poem nailed to the king’s door.

Who would be born on April Fools day? If there were choice in the matter, it would seem one might rather have April 2. Even so, and just as the first was coming to be known as a day of misrule, pranks, and outrageous satires, along came John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, born on April 1, 1647 and in a very short life destined to become the greatest April fool ever or, at least, of the 17th century. The child of a brave father, he was not without courage, which he showed in different ways as a youngish student at Oxford and then (barely older) as a hero in the Second Dutch War. Perhaps as a reward for bravery, he bedded the beautiful Nell Gwyn, soon to be King Charles II’s favorite mistress, and indeed Wilmot was well known for his other life in and around the Restoration theatre. But he’s best known for what he was, a Restoration rake and bon viveur, a rather good and often quite funny poet (as long as you were not the butt of his verse), and a philosopher and essayist who outrageously (given the era) toyed with materialism and “wrote more candidly about sex than anyone before the 20th century.” Rochester also could get away with twitting the king to his face, possibly because Charles II owed so much to his father’s bravery (Charles took these debts seriously, if no others), possibly because this king was, indeed (as Rochester wrote) the “Merry Monarch.” Soon Rochester fell out of favor even at this court, and although he still had some memorable pranks to play, for instance as a counselor and perhaps therapist (!!!) for men worried about their sterility, his many vices at length got the worse of him and he died at 33. Oddly, one of Rochester’s best and most sympathetic biographers was to be Graham Greene, no April Fool he. But then life is nothing if not surprises. ©

[Stanley]

She is magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous . . . and in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her. Henry James, on George Eliot.

Oakley Valimore Ethington was one of those Roosevelt High School teachers who tried to civilize this callow youth, but his comment (on my Senior report card) that “Bob has really blossomed out this year” was only embarrassing. Oakley loved poetry with wild abandon and I have since learned to hope that he meant my growing affection for poetry. He certainly could not have referred to my blinkered, bored reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, one of his course texts. Silas Marner was first published in London on April 2, 1861, but in Des Moines, 100 years on from its birth date, I regarded the novel as among the worst curses of my senior year. I am sure Oakley told us about Eliot, of the reasons she took such an odd pen-name, of her unconventional life and views that outraged mid-Victorian England (at least, the respectable part of it), but it was all lost on me. I simply did not recognize, then, even the presence (let alone the depth) of the author’s identification with the eponymous “hero” of the novel, that miserable miser Silas, lonely and unloved and, worse, deservedly so. His daily existence was dull and detailed enough and was made duller by his avaricious remembrance of lost wealth. And you should write, and I should read, a novel like this? So I completely missed Silas’s salvation in love and and in his redemptive care for his foundling, the beautiful, golden-haired Eppie, and knew nothing of George Eliot’s physical ugliness, her solitary existence, or her illicit love affair with the radical George Lewes. Nor did I understand her happiness at its consummation in marriage and her adoptive motherhood of Lewes’s children. Now that I know those things, I should (as Queen Victoria and Princess Louise did) read the novel a second time, and this time with feeling. ©

[Stanley]

I could never get Roosevelt interested in that other great American, Walt Whitman. Whitman’s democracy was too rank and unrelieved. John Burroughs’s obituary for Teddy Roosevelt, Natural History, 1919.

Some friends will know that I am not a fan of private education. But I do make exceptions. One of them is St. Louis’s poshest high school, the John Burroughs School, that has a progressive curriculum and a public focus. Its graduates include such as the neighborhood restorer-developer Joe Edwards; the late Leo Drey, the biggest Jewish timber baron in America, a conservation nut and provocateur philanthropist; a string of writers including William Burroughs, Jane Smiley, and Martha Gellhorn; and Edward Foote, St. Louis’s much-loved (and much-hated) desegregation advocate. And my good friend Dick Jung was a leading faculty member at Burroughs before he went off to shake up private education in the nation’s capital. So it is entirely fitting that the school is named after one of the seedier characters in American (natural) history, the naturalist John Burroughs, hermit extraordinaire, Thoreau of his generation, boon companion of a mixed bag of misfits that included his wife, the unconventional Ursula, the very bohemian Walt Whitman, a politician called Teddy Roosevelt who (as a sickly lad) may have been entranced by Burroughs’s nature books and later joined Burroughs’s camping compadres Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. Burroughs was born on April 3, 1837, and started rebelling almost immediately. I like him greaty because I share one of his pet peeves, the nature “popularizer” who is compelled to make a docudrama out of any nature scene, with anthropomorphic villains, heroes and victims. Burroughs’s late life crusade against such “nature fakers” (his phrase) badly needs a modern successor. John Burroughs’ best memorials are his tumbledown Catskills shack (a National Historic Landmark) and a St. Louis school that (if $$$$$ expensive) yet has its heart in a good place. ©

[Tizer]

"..the nature “popularizer” who is compelled to make a docudrama out of any nature scene, with anthropomorphic villains, heroes and victims."

True natural historians hate `nature fakers' but television loves them and they love TV.