OneGuyFromBarlick

How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese? Charles de Gaulle.

“L’état, c’est moi,” Louis XIV said in 1655, when France was Europe’s premier power and he was on the threshold of his majority and already begun on his long, long (1643-1715) reign as champion of absolute rule. In 1940, another Frenchman said “Je suis La france” in circumstances that were (one must say) hardly freighted at all. He was Charles de Gaulle, temporary field rank brigadier, barely escaped from the Fall of France in a rickety small plane and with a pittance of cash—in French francs. For such as man to say “I am France” while Hitler pranced down the Champs Elysées might have been regarded as tragicomic, but Winston Churchill saw in Charles de Gaulle a man of destiny. Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, that man of destiny, was born in Lille on November 22, 1890, into a family quite conscious of its petite noblesse history and its tradition of military service. His father, scholar and school headmaster, had been wounded in the Franco-Prussian war, and Charles was brought up on revenge and educated at St. Cyr. He joined the army just in time for the bloodbath of WWI, served with courage and distinction, and afterwards settled into a military career under the patronage of Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain who, ironically, led Vichy while de Gaulle led the Free French and irritated Franklin Roosevelt almost beyond patience. De Gaulle’s most significant years, however, were to come later, as President under the Fifth Republic (1958-68), an authoritarian figure who rescued France from the agonies of Algeria and restored the nation to center stage in European and world diplomacy but who would himself succumb to the domestic chaos of 1968, losing a plebiscite that, in his own mind, might indeed have made Charles de Gaulle the embodiment of the state. ©

When you with women in discourse do sit,/ Before their Faces you'll commend their wit. Lady Mary Villiers.

These ‘Anniversary Notes’ have already featured Aphra Behn who as a publicly published woman writer of Restoration England was a rare bird indeed. Today, thanks to the detective work of Mary Mulvihill at Princeton, we celebrate another, whose political poem To Madame Behn was licenced for publication on November 23, 1678. The anonymous authoress (as I think we have to name her, given the circumstances) was almost certainly Lady Mary Villiers (1622-1685). As the daughter of a Stuart court favorite (George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham), as foster-child of King Charles I, and as the wife of yet another court favorite (and another Scottish “Stewart”), the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, Lady Mary might have gone public with her authorship of To Madame Behn, a spirited attack on the agitators behind the Popish Plot hysteria and thus very much in the royal interest. But despite her close court connections, Lady Mary wrote under anonymity’s cloak. Also, it’s worth pointing out, she had previously published—anonymously—a witty satire on court moralities and personalities, including King Charles II himself and his brother James, and it probably would not do to go public even with a political poem in the royal interest. When you have already anonymously published a play called A Pair-Royal of Coxcombs, and you are a highly placed woman at the court of a real royal coxcomb (Charles II) and his coxcomb brother, your continued silence is probably golden. It’s likely that Lady Mary’s identity and authorships were known or guessed by some contemporaries, notably the writer John Dunton, but it remained for Mary Mulvihill to do her detective work and to give credit where assuredly it is long overdue. ©

It is never right to play ragtime fast. Scott Joplin.

A new biography is out about Sam Phillips, the southern white guy who discovered a host of black and white musicians (e.g. Elvis Presley and B. B. King) and is said to have “invented” rock ‘n’ roll. A rare bird, for our popular music had long been segregated territory. Now cut to the very beginnings of Jim Crow segregation, and to a German Jewish immigrant named Julius Weiss, a “professor of music,” who settled in rural East Texas and discovered a poor black boy with great talent. So of course Julius taught him for free, classical and folk, anything to keep his attention, for five years. That kid turned out to be Scott Joplin, probably born on November 24, 1868 and who certainly turned out to be a musical genius, and a grateful one. When Joplin had achieved some good fortune and heard that Julius was poor and ill, he sent his teacher gifts of money until the old man died. Joplin himself moved to Missouri, first Sedalia and then St. Louis, continued to study music but also to compose and perform, to teach and to become something of an impresario on tour with an all-black company. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, and it took its toll (Joplin died of syphilis at age 48), but he left behind several ragtime classics, notably the “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer” and an opera, Treemonisha. His was not music to be improvised but to be played as written, an art form in itself. Joplin’s rewards, if enough to send a kind of pension to Julius Weiss, were not great. Joplin died poor in New York City and was buried there in a pauper’s grave. He was “discovered” too late (notably supplying the score of the Redford-Newman movie The Sting), and unusually awarded a posthumous Pulitzer for music. Scott Joplin needed a Sam Phillips, but we are lucky that he did get a Julius Weiss. ©

Such pip-squeaks as Nixon and McCarthy are trying to get us so frightened that we will be afraid to turn out the lights at night. Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Richard Nixon’s dislike for Jack Kennedy is well enough known to qualify as notorious. What is less well known is that Congressman Kennedy contributed $ to Congressman Nixon’s notorious 1950 Senate campaign against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, California’s “Pink Lady.” In winning that one, Nixon showed that scaring Americans was good politics (Trump take note?) and began my father’s estrangement from the Republican party. But what of Ms. Douglas? Her posthumously published autobiography was entitled A Full Life, and despite her 1950 defeat at the hands of the trickster we will have to grant her that. Helen Gahagan was born on November 25, 1900, into an Irish immigrant family that had proved its American mettle by vaulting to the top of New York’s shipbuilding industry and into the Episcopalian Church. Helen graduated from Barnard College in 1924 and almost immediately moved into acting, first on Broadway and then secondly (after marrying Melvyn Douglas) in Hollywood, where she played “she who must be obeyed,” Queen Hash-a-Motep, in an H. Rider Haggard jungle epic. Deciding that that was enough of that, she went into politics and served three terms (1945-51) in Congress. There Douglas espoused liberal causes and politicians (having a prolonged and public love affair with a young New Dealer from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson), and served in a number of delegations at the request of President Truman. What Helen Gahagan Douglas did to rile Congressman Kennedy is not known, but let’s guess that dad Joe (who supplied the $$$) didn’t like liberals, son Jack was at that time proving his anti-communist credentials, and perhaps neither one of them liked a beautiful woman having an affair with a populist hick from the Pedernales. ©

Good grief, who are all these little people? Must I live with them for the rest of my life? Charles M. Schulz, circa 1960.

In the 1950s, two daily cartoon strips vied for supremacy on college campuses, Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Both were about character and both depended on a stable community of very idiosyncratic characters, the “stars” of the strips. My dad thought Pogo the clear winner and showered me with Pogo books and annuals, and indeed Pogo was very successful, but the market spoke a different language and made Schulz’s Peanuts the all-time champion. Schulz himself thought Pogo way too political (a view he took, later, of Doonesbury), and kept his characters’ moralities firmly in the realm of the personal. But moralities there were, and Peanuts could have bite. Even Snoopy the agreeable mutt could nip, and one clergyman (perhaps more than one) thought the strip an extended essay on original sin. If that was correct, it was perhaps also appropriate to Charles Schulz, born on November 26, 1922 in Minneapolis, MN, and a life-long member of and occasional lay preacher in the Church of God. Along the way, Schulz (like many others) had a bad World War II and ever after was active in memorializing the dead. After various experiments with getting a living on civvy street, Schulz published his first Peanuts cartoon on October 2, 1950. It caught on fairly quickly and by the 1960s Charles Schulz was rich and famous, not only syndicated across the globe but the commercial genius at the center of a franchising industry that used Peanuts characters to sell Hallmark cards, Ford Falcons, Metropolitan Life Insurance and (eventually) 20,000 other products. 18,250 daily and Sunday strips and fifty years later, Charles Schulz died. It was maybe a measure of his genius that the NY Times obituary also biographed each of the strip’s main characters. ©

LINK to NYT obituary

By hook or by crook. Traditional saying.

In the revolutionary year 1776, Tom Paine was delighted to point out the disgraceful history of monarchy, right up to the reigning “royal brute” George III, so imagine his delight had he survived long enough to witness the long regency and mercifully short monarchy of George IV. The Regency Period marked the modern nadir of monarchy but was also an age of excess for others, among them the high Tory pamphleteer, embezzler, and practical joker Theodore Hook (1788-1841) whose life demonstrated the truth of the old adage “when the pot boils the scum will rise.” Hook was perhaps most famous for his short-lived scandal sheet John Bull, which he used to libel the awful Queen Caroline probably on behalf of her even awfuller husband George IV, but he also invented, drew, stamped with a penny black and sent the world’s oldest post card (it sold recently for £31,000) and served, briefly and scandalously, as the treasurer of the colony of Mauritius. Today, we remember his Berners Street Hoax, November 27, 1810, perpetrated on the innocent householder of 54 Berners Street (a Mrs. Tottenham) in the service of Hook’s wager with a friend that he could transform any house into the most famous address in the kingdom. This Hook did by sending out scores of letters to everyone from chimney sweeps to butchers to the Lord Mayor of London to the Archbishop of Canterbury begging their attendance on Mrs. Tottenham’s various needs, e.g. for provisions, medical care, or a death watch. Hook and friend witnessed the resulting traffic jam from an upstairs window across from no. 54. A plausible character (his brother James was dean of Worcester Cathedral), Hook won the admiration of many, including the poet Coleridge. But not of poor Mrs. Tottenham, nor of the malodorous Caroline.©

Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them. Nancy Mitford.

In the USA, although many politicians try to speak Texan, there is properly speaking no “proper” national speech. But in Britain—especially England—the art form was fully developed through the 18th century by the rise of the London season, the importance of political speech (e.g. in parliament), and the popularity of various watering holes (Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Harrogate) where gentle folk and their betters gathered to improve their healths and their carriages and, it is thought, their accents. By the 20th century, some odd linguistic overlays had been developed, especially by the very aristocratic, the very idle, the very young and the very bright, and in 1954 a Birmingham linguist, Alan Ross, published an analysis of what he called “U and non-U speech” (for Upper and non-Upper class). It was an obscure academic piece, of the sort satirized by Kingsley Amis, but it was picked up and run with by the very aristocratic and very bright Nancy Mitford, first as a joke (she enjoyed jokes) and then as a slightly more serious venture. No longer very young (she was born on November 28, 1904) but still bright enough, Mitford had made a name for herself as a writer of the (Upper) class novel and was in the process of becoming a popular intellectual, so people listened to her who might not have heard Professor Ross. Nancy was one of the very formidable Mitford sisters, all Bright Young Things of the 1920s. She was the one who did not flirt with fascism but instead with Free French officers, the second of whom, a Colonel Gaston Palewski, became the love of her life and may have helped inspire her best fiction, The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1948). Mitford followed Palewski to liberated Paris, where she lived more or less permanently until her final illnesses. ©

One of the joys of returning to England after a long spell abroad was to be able, after a few minutes conversation, to be able to estimate someone's place of birth, intelligence, and social standing. That and being able to shop without having to haggle or be robbed.
The U and Non U thing still fascinates me. The 'Uppers' are usually more plain speaking. We say toilet, they say lavatory. There's a poem called 'The Stranger ' by Kipling which says it all. Probably be labelled 'racist' by the 'bien pensant', but it hits the mark with me.

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

Interesting David. I've never come across that poem before. Thanks for that.

Education and general social conditions have a stupendous influence on the development of the originative faculty present in a nation. John Ambrose Fleming.

Those who remember the agonies of waiting for their radio to warm up are a shrinking minority, but one that should celebrate the birth anniversary of John Ambrose Fleming, who invented the vacuum tube, for which he took out a British patent in November 1904. He called it an oscillation valve, and it required further refinement before, in the 1920s, it would replace the oddly named “cat’s whiskers” at the heart of the wireless radio. Fleming was born in Lancaster, England, on November 29, 1849, where his father James was minister in the Congregationalist Chapel. He derived from his father a lifelong devotion to the church and from his mother, Mary Ann, a consuming curiosity about what made things tick. These two impulses warred within Fleming and made him into a world class scientist who warred passionately with Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1932, with two other scientists, he founded the “Evolution Protest Movement” (now called the Creation Science Movement) and served as its first president. On the other side of his life, Fleming earned two first-class honours degrees (from London and then Cambridge) and worked in both industry and the academy until, in the 1890s, he took up a professorial chair at London (the first English chair in electrical engineering), from where he directed pioneering research in radio and then television and radar transmission and reception. Fleming’s patent for the vacuum tube would be invalidated in US Courts, but his radically democratic views on science and science education were not noticeably stunted by this experience. Knighted for his service to science, Fleming lived to a grand old age and, childless through two marriages, bequeathed most of his considerable fortune to church charities. ©

Bob's Bits passed 80,000 page views today, I shall inform him.....

I would be a bit cautious with the page hits Stanley. Site bots are accessing the topics 24/7/365 these count towards the totals as well. Have a look in Who is Online at the bottom of the page to see which ones are currently active.

It's the only measure of how many times the page is accessed. Not all bots so it's a valid measure.

I do not wish for women to have power over men, but over themselves. Mary Wollstonecroft, 1792.

My first doctor, Varina DesMarias, was the first woman doctor in Grundy County, Iowa, and later I learned from her of the difficulties facing women in medical care as well as in medical practice. For instance, did you know that in the 1800s, in some localities, hospitals would not admit adult female patients who had no male connection? One can just about guess the “reasoning.” Minneapolis, MN, was one of those localities, and when Dr. Martha Rogers Ripley arrived there in 1883 she set about doing something to change that, first in her practice (where she treated females of all sorts) and then by founding a hospital. She called it a maternity hospital but in fact it welcomed all females, girls and adults, even if not pregnant and even if not married. Dr. Ripley, born in New Hampshire on November 30, 1843, had married well (into a Lowell cotton-mill family), parented three daughters, and before getting agitated about medicine had agitated for women’s rights. Her increasing concern with mill girls’ health and welfare led her to Boston University’s medical school, where she graduated in 1883. In that year the Ripleys moved to Minneapolis where Martha became the family’s chief breadwinner (Mr. Ripley was by then an invalid) and a tireless campaigner for women’s rights generally and for their right to medical care in particular. She was Professor of Medicine at Minneapolis’s Homeopathic Medical College, President of the Minnesota Women’s Suffrage Association, and co-founder of the Women’s Rescue League. One of her victories was to raise Minnesota’s “age of consent” (for females, to have sex with a male) which had been set at 10 (you may supply your own exclamation points). Martha tried for 18, but could only convince the good men of the Minnesota legislature to raise it to 14. ©

Got a little rhythm. Ira Gershwin.

On December 1, 1924, a new musical, Lady, Be Good!, opened on Broadway, at the Liberty Theatre, a product of the fevered brains of George and Ira Gershwin (music and lyrics), Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson (script and production), Norman Bel Geddes (scenery and design), and the flashing feet and fairly tuneful voices of Fred and Adele Astaire, the brother and sister from Omaha who played the musical’s lead brother-and-sister roles on stage. Lady Be Good! was a great success, running for almost a year (330 performances) during a hugely competitive period in the New York theater, and in then enjoyed a similarly long run (326 performances) in London in 1926. Even though it was the toast of two towns, however, Lady Be Good! would hardly be noticeable, coming as it did during a remarkably creative run for the Gershwin brothers and their English collaborators Bolton and Thompson. To take George Gershwin alone, 1924 was also the year of “Rhapsody in Blue,” his first successful foray into classical composition (and the start of his tutelage with Nadia Boulanger) and of his and Ira’s Harlem-set jazz opera Blue Monday (the forerunner of Porgy and Bess). Fred and Adele were also on a ten-year roll with a string of great hits in New York and London (e.g. Funny Face and The Band Wagon), and when Guy Bolton teamed with anybody (P. G. Wodehouse, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, George Grossmith, Cole Porter) he seemed to be a 1920s guarantor of stage success. So Lady Be Good! is memorable partly for the names it can drop, but more than that we remember Lady Be Good! for its best song, “Fascinating Rhythm”, a tune that pitter-pats through my brain. So darn persistent, the day isn’t distant, when it’ll drive me insane. ©

All I could say is that I enjoyed the scientific work . . . I enjoyed bringing up a family . . . I enjoyed running around the world. So all kinds of good things happened. Isabella Karle, March 2015.

Isabella Lugoski Karle was born in Detroit on December 2, 1921 into a household in which only Polish was spoken. Her mother (who had no formal education) worked in a cigar factory and her dad maintained city buses, but they (and her Detroit schoolteachers) recognized that the little girl had talents and got her to Ann Arbor at a very tender age where on her 23rd birthday she copped a PhD in Chemistry. At Ann Arbor Isabella met her husband, Jerome Karle, a mathematician at heart displaced into Chemistry, and sometimes together but usually separately the Karles would fashion what must be the best husband-and-wife science story since the Curies. They didn’t retire until 2009 after 127 years (combined total) of working for the government, latterly in the US Naval Research Labs in Washington, DC. Jerome, a Nobelist in Chemistry, deserves his own note. Isabella’s awards list is almost as impressive, for work on the Manhattan Project (where among other things but incidentally she discovered a dangerously radioactive Coke machine) but especially, in the 1950s and 1960s, for fundamental work on crystallography and X-Ray diffraction that—had it been known earlier—might have made easier the DNA discoveries of Crick, Watson, Wilkins, and Franklin. It was one of the rare projects on which the Karles worked together (“we had our other collaborators”), Isabella on the chemistry of it and Jerome on the geometry. Her X-Ray discoveries later enabled Isabella to do astonishing work on synthesizing animal toxins, incredibly complex molecules, all in hopes, she said, of finding treatments for heart failure. Isabella’s heart and head are still going strong in 2015, as you can see and hear in her online oral history interview for the Atomic Heritage Foundation. ©

Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down. Whittier, "Barbara Frietche", 1864.

Barbara Frietsche’s name historically has been spelled in a variety of ways, “Frietchie” in Whittier’s eponymous patriotic poem (1864) and “Fritchie” at her house, now a museum, and at Laurel Park, Maryland, where the annual Barbara “Fritchie” Handicap is open only to fillies and mares. And there are other inaccuracies. Most important of them all, Barbara never, ever hung her Union flag out of her window in defiance of Stonewall Jackson’s rebel troops as they passed through Barbara’s town of Frederick, Maryland, on their way to the bloody battle of Antietam (its northern name) or Sharpsburg (as it’s called at the south). Nor (obviously) did General Jackson order his troops (on pain of death) not to harm her “old grey head.” Indeed Barbara had a stars and stripes out; she ordered her servant to take it in to avoid an incident. But Barbara Frietsche’s head was very definitely old and grey, for she was born (Barbara Hauer, in Pennsylvania Dutch country) on December 3, 1766 and she would die (aged 92) shortly after Stonewall Jackson passed through Frederick. And she was very definitely a patriot, close friend of Francis Scott Key and, well before the Civil War a local fixture in Frederick patriotic observances. There was a union flag hung out, though, a few houses away, by Mary Quantrell, on that “cool September morn", and 81 years later, in 1943, on the way to their historic meeting at Shangra-la (now Camp David) the canny Winston Churchill recited Whittier’s poem from memory to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as they passed by the Frietsche house. “’Shoot if you must this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.” So Barbara’s patriotic gesture lived on in our symbolic imagination, which is where it began its life anyway. ©

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, hear what he had to say, and make fun of it. Carlyle.

There is a charming, ironic story about the first meeting (1833) between the American philosopher Emerson and the British philosopher Carlyle. Asked later about it, each thought the other “talked too much.” It is often thus, but the meeting led to a life-long correspondence that ceased only with Carlyle’s death in 1881 (Emerson followed a year later). Thomas Carlyle, born in Ecclefechan, Dumfries, on December 4, 1795 was possibly the more interesting and the more consistent of the two men, but they had some things in common. Carlyle was born into a conservative offshoot of Scottish Presbyterianism and (it could be argued) never lost his Calvinism though his loss of faith was (like Emerson’s) the making of him, chronicled obliquely in his 1836 novel Sartor Resartus (“the tailor re-tailored”). With Emerson’s foreword, the book was published in Boston before it was printed in Britain. But by 1836, already ensconced in London, already an historian of note, happily married to Jane Welsh, Carlyle had real fame yet before him, which he found in his history of The French Revolution (1837, used by Dickens to source the latter’s Tale of Two Cities) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841). The last-named presaged Carlyle’s more conservative views as he waxed cynical about the capabilities (moral and intellectual) of the mass of men and looked, for salvation, to “The Great Man.” It bears odd similarities and huge contrasts with Emerson’s 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” History’s verdict may be that both men did indeed talk too much. But Jane Carlyle’s comment, that Emerson’s was like “the visit of an angel”, reminds us that here was truly a meeting of the minds, equally instructive in its commonalities and its contrasts. ©

Then grant, Mæcenas, thy paternal rays, Hear me propitious, and defend my lays. Phillis Wheatley.

Phillis Wheatley died in Boston on December 5, 1784. She was only 31, or so. We don’t know her birthdate. She got her first name from the slave ship that brought her from The Gambia and her surname from John Wheatley, the man who bought her, in Boston, when she was about 8. She was intended as a house slave, but the Wheatleys (in good Lockean fashion) regarded her as tabula rasa on which anything might be written, and noticing her ready intelligence helped her to become a slave-scholar, reading Latin and Greek classics by age 12, commenting on Bible passages, studying Pope, Milton, Homer, and Vergil. Soon she began to write poetry, and to be a slave sensation. As with other black writers after her, e.g. Frederick Douglass, her genius raised skeptics, and she was examined by a committee of cognoscenti (including John Hancock) to see if Phillis the accomplished poet was really and truly Phillis the black slave. Indeed she was, and it was in both characters that she went to London where, as in Boston, she was a slave triumph. It is also in both characters (African slave and colonial poet) that she is studied today, and some scholars find—as did some contemporaries—that her work was only in part derivative of the culture in which she had found herself an alien and most terribly vulnerable child. There are in it recurring themes that can only have had their origins in Phillis’s memories of her first home and of her terrifying passage away from it. So in modern scholarship Phillis Wheatley has found an identity and a freedom denied to her for most of her short life. Freed in 1778 by John Wheatley’s will, but without sufficient resources in an unsettled economy, Phillis Wheatley sank from sight and from life in the first years of the American Republic. ©

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. Stephen Leacock.

Back in the day, an encyclopedia on the shelves marked of middle-class respectability, respect for knowledge and care for one’s children. It was also expensive, and until I was in high school (when a new World Book encyclopedia was bought), I depended on a rather dowdy 1939 printing of the Encyclopedia Britannica dad had picked up, surplus, from the Drake University library. It was indeed, dad insisted, a source to depend on. Not all knowledge was new, and the EB was thorough, scholarly, and (relatively to the World Book) uncensored and unafraid. That Britannica would still be worth a read, e.g. for its time-bound views on “Hitler, Adolf,” and “atom, the,” but alas it eventually went (as did all my parents’ surplus books) to the great Iowa Planned Parenthood Book Sale whose causes mom and dad delighted to support. Ours was the 14th edition of a series that first saw the light of the Edinburgh day, probably a dark morning, December 6, 1768, when the first of three volumes published by “a society of gentlemen in Scotland” appeared. Not for the Christmas market, for in Presbyterian Scotland Christmas was still thought to be Romish holiday, but for the spread of knowledge about things high (the “aether”) and low (how to design and sweep chimneys), with perhaps a Scots emphasis on practicality, but also with an eye to outdo the French, whose Encyclopédies had, our Edinburgh gentlemen thought, not been encyclopedic enough. How well they succeeded, time told. Well before its 14th edition hit our shelves (for $10), the Britannica was the world’s most successful encyclopedia, in any language. Alas, it ceased print editions in 2012, but you can still (as I do, often) consult its “pages” on line. For a small annual fee, of course. ©

when you're 15 you want to be loved and accepted, and I just wasn't ready for the kind of response I would get coming to school Melba Patillo Beals

Melba Patillo Beals was born into a fairly prosperous Little Rock home on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor day as it happened. By the time she was in her
teens, her mother had earned a PhD at the recently-integrated University of Arkansas, her dad had a good job on the railroad, and her elder brother was a US Marshall in Little Rock who would soon be employed in protecting his sister. For Melba (along with eight other children) was about to cause a whole lot of trouble by choosing to attend Central High School, where she and her family believed she would have a better education than in her assigned, segregated, “separate but equal” school. As anyone alive and sentient in 1956 will remember, little Melba endured quite a lot on her first day, indeed through her first year, before the elected governor of her state chose to close the schools rather than to allow integration. Melba turned out OK, though. She finished her high school in California (under special guardianship), went to college, did well: she married, birthed a child, and divorced; adopted a couple more kids; wrote a few books; and is now chair emerita of the Communication Department at Dominican University in San Francisco. Melba’s books include two well-regarded memoirs about her experiences during the Little Rock integration crisis. Her degrees include an MA from Columbia (the Journalism School) and a PhD from the University of San Francisco. Her awards are many, including the Congressional Gold Medal. And who was that governor, anyway? ©

I am happy that I have been able to live by his side . . . I do not say that it has always been easy . . . but I am very happy. Aino Sibelius.

Art folk are not noted for the length of their marriages, so Jean and Aino Sibelius may have set a record. They fell in love when Aino was 17 and married (1892) when she was 21. Death parted them 65 years later, when Jean died. Aino lived another dozen years. Their graves lie together in the grounds of the house they built to celebrate their 10th anniversary, called “Ainola” or Aino’s Place, at Järvenplää. It is a most romantic house, now a Finnish national museum, and it was a tempestuous marriage whose stable partner, the weight and fulcrum of the family, was the younger, aristocratic Aino. Jean Sibelius, born on December 8, 1865, had his demons to contend with, first orphaned at 2, then a failed attempt to become a violin virtuoso, and then throughout life periodic bouts of heavy drinking and smoking (including long spells of treatment and surgery for throat cancer, circa 1907-1925) and heavy depressions when his musical compositions failed to impress critics or colleagues. Finally, during the famed “silence of Järvenplää” (that lasted from 1930 to the end of his life), Sibelius burned almost all of his music manuscripts on a “terrible day.” “I did not have the strength to be present,” Aino later wrote, but in truth she had the strength to be “present” for 65 years, to raise successfully five daughters who married well and had productive careers, and for the most part to keep Jean Sibelius alive, and well, and in tolerable humor, and in good company, and composing. Perhaps, then, it is to Aino that we owe my father’s favorite classical piece, Sibelius’s stirringly patriotic “Finlandia” (1899-1902) which, appropriately enough, was played last night by our local NPR station, albeit not in dad’s Ormandy recording. ©

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. Grace Hopper.

As grandparents we are learning anew how wonderfully curious children are, but things can get out of hand as when 7-year old Grace Murray (Hopper) asked her mother if she could see how a clock worked. Permission given, Grace dissected every clock in the house. She put them all back together again but after that there was a one-clock rule. Born in New York City on December 9, 1906, Grace performed so well at Vassar that she was asked immediately to join the college’s math faculty. She did so but also enrolled in Yale’s graduate school, where she met her husband, Vincent Hopper, and earned her mathematics PhD in 1934. She continued to teach at Vassar but in 1943 joined the US Naval Reserve. Thereafter Grace divided her time between the navy and civvy street, spending enough time with the navy to be promoted to Admiral. In the Navy, and in industry, she was credited with pioneering the development of the “Mark” series of computers and then Univac. This was all in the service of her belief that computers and software could and should be widely deployed in industry, education, and government. She played a prominent role in the development of computer languages, notably COBOL, and continued to work in the field until shortly before her death in 1992. In 1969, Grace Hopper won the first-ever “Man of the Year” award given out by the computer industry. Besides her obvious gifts in computer science, Grace Hopper revolutionized the computing workplace by encouraging teamwork, to speed research and development through the sharing of codes among individuals and between teams. Some also credit Grace with appropriating the term “debugging,” apparently after removing a moth from the Mark II computer at Harvard. ©

Babbage's Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. Augusta Ada Lovelace, 1843.

Hear Lord Byron (in Childe Harold’’s Pilgrimage) on the subject of his daughter:

Ada! sole daughter of my house and my heart.

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,

Then we parted—not as we now part, but with a hope.

Ada Byron was born (December 10, 1815) into a famously unstable marriage. Childe Harold was written in bits, 1812-1818, and by the time he got to the end of it, Byron dedicated it to his then mistress, the 17-year-old Lady Charlotte Harley. Lord Byron had long since left Ada and her mother, Annabella, and would soon enough sail off to the Greek Revolution and death. Ada’s mother and Charlotte Harley would live on for quite long whiles, but Ada herself died painfully in 1852, virtually a prisoner of her mother (who was more concerned with Ada’s gambling than with her illnesses). A sadly short life, to be sure, but before it was over Ada had married nobility and, as Countess Lovelace, produced a daughter (Anne Isabella) who would be a a noted equestrian, a writer, and a poet’s wife. But before that, Ada, Lady Lovelace, had become a mathematician. An odd fate, to be sure, but her mother, fearing that Ada might become a poet, had her tutored in math and the sciences, and Ada became a rather fine mathematician, a collaborator with Charles Babbage on his “analytical engine” (which some see as the first computer), and a writer on various mathematical subjects including number theory. Her most interesting idea was that Babbage’s ‘engine’ might be trained to run to different musical notes or to precisely punched cards. These were early intimations of computer programming; perhaps also they tell us that Ada’s smiling blue eyes saw poetry in many things. ©