OneGuyFromBarlick

Emotion cannot be buried by words,although it can be aroused by them. Phyllis Ayame Whitney.

The most famous American crime fiction gives us the hard-boiled sleuth, often but not always with a very well concealed heart of gold, a thread of decency that (if present) is often used to tie up the plot. He (or she, for women gumshoes have multiplied of late) operates in a shady world made up of characters who you would not want as your next door neighbors, far less next of kin. But there are other ways to skin the mystery cat, and Phyllis Ayame Whitney’s novels fully explored one of them, called variously (by her reviewers) “gothic” or “romantic” crime fiction. And more unusually she wrote them for adults (41), juveniles (23), and children (14). Whitney was born in Japan on September 9, 1903 (‘ayame’ is Japanese for iris), and died in Florida in 2008, so you might say she had plenty of time to write 78 novels, but (a) she wrote other books, too, and (b) she didn’t start until she was married, living in Chicago, and in her 40s. That was her first marriage, but that husband didn’t like her writing so she jumped ship and married another, retaining her maiden name all the while. She liked to set her novels in known places, so the first several are in Chicago, but her second husband liked to travel and Whitney soon regarded her vacations as research trips. Her plots reflected this, moving along with the writer from Maui to North Carolina’s outer islands, Sedona to Oslo, and (not too far) from Turkey to Greece. Ms. Whitney won her last (of quite a few) crime fiction award in 1988, a “lifetime” Edgar, but she published nine more books after that, a bit off her earlier pace but still good going for an old lady writing gothic romances about bloody murder (and lesser crimes, for the kids). Most, it would appear, are still in print. ©

As I speak in court today, over one million men in the field, in our great struggle, our Civil War, are clothed and kitted by fabric sewn on machines using my inventions. Elias Howe, 1863.

Why not celebrate sewing on 10th September 2016? This day marks the 170th anniversary of Elias Howe’s 1846 patent for, yes, the lock-stitch sewing machine. Howe, born in 1819 in Massachusetts, is interesting on several counts, not least because he’s a patentee who actually made money from his patent (a rarer coincidence than you might think, for historically it’s been smarter to be a patentee than an inventor). He was also a devoted advocate of the abolition of slavery, uncommon for industrialists involved in the cotton trade. But Howe was an even rarer avis because he contributed a large share of his fortune to clothe, arm, and supply a regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War. It was more common for northern industrialists (like J. P. Morgan’s dad) to make fortunes from the war but otherwise steer clear. Even more unusually, indeed perhaps unique, this millionaire chose to serve in the Union Army as an elderly private (he was by then in his 40s). Despite Howe’s unusual generosity and even more unusual sacrifice, he died a rich man (in 1867). He had successfully defended his wealth through legal aggression against other inventors, like Isaac Singer, who improved on Howe’s basic design but attempted to bypass paying him for his patent rights. (The patent lawyers also profited, for the case against Singer lasted over five years in the courts). There is a rumor, false but interesting, that Howe managed to get himself buried in London. It may date from the Beatles’ decision to dedicate their 1965 film Help! to Elias Howe. On the other hand, the dedication may have arisen from the rumor. Ringo Starr said that the whole film was conceived and executed in a haze of pot (of which, one presumes, Elias Howe would not have approved). In any case, Howe rests in peace in Brooklyn. ©

how bouquets fell in showers, and the roof was rent with applause – how it thundered outside, and inside . . . how we all loved Jenny Lind. Emily Dickinson on a Lind concert in Boston.

In Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), Lawrence Levine demonstrated that one divide early 19th-century America did not have to worry about was that between high art and popular culture. In rural hamlets and in urban metropolises, Shakespeare plays and Schubert concerts were attended by doctors and dockhands, laborers and lawyers, and their ladies too. By century’s end, various factors conspired to kill this comity, and entertainments were packaged for, and attended by, only certain social strata. Jenny Lind’s triumphant 2-year tour of the US, which began with a sold-out concert in New York City on September 11, 1850, was attended by the rude and the refined of all ages, both sexes, and most classes (e.g. by Emily Dickinson in Boston and by Walt Whitman in New York). But the rot had already set in. Lind—the “Swedish Nightingale”—was distressed by the rank commercialism that attended her 93-concert tour. Having resolved at the outset to give her “profits” (she did pay her expenses, and while on tour lived as well as one could) to charity, she could not stop P. T. Barnum and his cronies from selling Lind nightshirts, teacups, cravats, even Lind sausages. Before the tour ended, she angrily parted company from P. T., and a large penalty fee changed hands on that night. From the first, Barnum had auctioned off concert tickets, and stopped only when Lind insisted on his offering specified blocks of seats and promenade space, at every venue, at prices ordinary folk could pay. There is every evidence that they did pay. The tour grossed well over $20 million in today’s $$$, from which Jenny Lind gave millions to Sweden’s free schools and to various American charities (and to help build two Lutheran churches in the Midwest). Barnum? He counted his millions all the way to the bank. ©

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 1992.

Among the trivia you do not need to know, here are two items of idlest interest. Michael Ondaatje’s father was president of the Ceylon Cactus and Succulent Society and distributed ping pong balls around the family enclosure to keep the local cobras from eating chicken eggs. On the other hand, they may not pass the trivia test of facthood, for they are from Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982), which he calls a “biographical gesture” with a “fictional air.” Let us just say, then, that they are stories reminding us that Michael Ondaatje was indeed born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on September 12, 1943. His mother moved to England in 1954 (where Michael was schooled at Dulwich) and then Michael moved on to Canada for his college degree, his citizenship, and his home. His first fully paid work was for teaching English at university, but he was always a writer and by 1990 was secure enough to retire from the York University faculty to devote full time to writing. Of course, writers (and their families) need to eat, and just in time along came The English Patient, his spell-binding prize-winning 1992 novel, and then more money came when (most of) it was made into a superfine film in 1996. Undoubtedly he’s made most from his fiction (and semi-fictions!!), but in a lengthy (and fascinating) 2007 interview in a Toronto fine arts paper (yes, Virginia, there are such things in civilized countries), he declared himself a poet in practice and at heart, and typically but not always his novels are peppered with poetic lines, quatrains, stanzas. But he began as a poet who wrote some prose. Indeed, Ondaatje’s first book of poetry was The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), distinguished for its flashes of prose, mainly narrative. “Somewhere in the middle [of Billy],” he later said, “I realized I needed to try to write prose.” There are, Michael Ondaatje believes, some things that a poem cannot do. ©

His life seems to be as complex as his book. I've seen the film, but must confess that I didn't understand at all what was happening. I just don't get on with films which switch between time periods. Not clever enough I guess.

I remember a long time ago seeing a long list of the film's plot inconsistencies. The only one I remember was 'why was there a double bed in a convent?'. I've tried to find it, but no trace on google. I suspect some PR company has been cleaning up.

That's a good question David! I share your problem with time shifts in plots.... Some of them are so badly done!

Every man has his faults; I have and so have you - you will allow me to say so! Clara Schumann.

Clara Wieck Schumann was born on September 13, 1819, died in 1896, and lived a life that was not without controversy. Indeed, arguments about her character persist, and revolve around the issues of how she treated her husband, Robert (a composer who died in 1854) and several of her eight children (the four who predeceased her). Some biographers have her as obsessed by her own career, cruelly neglecting Robert after he was institutionalized, and coldly ignoring her children’s illnesses, while she banged away on her piano. These posthumous critics add to this indictment her relationships with other great figures of music’s romantic age, notably Johannes. To all this the first answer is that her century was littered with great men who kept mistresses and neglected their wives and families, as it were in order to maintain their greatness, so what’s wrong with Clara, anyway? And her romances were probably platonic ones. But it’s more to the point that she was, indeed, a great musician, a composer of distinction and a genius at the keyboard, one who demonstrably resisted and survived a domineering father, inspired Robert to his greatest compositions, and through her concerts and her teaching revolutionized piano playing. We should remember too that Robert Schumann, though a brilliant composer, was a bit of a domestic tyrant, during his short life keeping Clara to the childbirth and house mistress grindstone (her composing and playing markedly slowed down during the 1840s). She was quite lucky to escape the syphilis that drove him mad and then killed him, though she not always escaped his violent temper. But Robert, fearing for his wife’s safety, did institutionalize himself, and thus two years before his death he freed Clara to pursue her own chosen fate with her own chosen friends. It seems to me we should be reluctant to blame her for doing just that. ©
[Editing early in the morning to reduce essays to a single page is often hazardous, and in this case I reduced one of Clara Schumann’s most famous ‘lovers’ to a mere Johannes. He was of course the great Brahms and he was dazzled by his pianist friend when he was a mere slip of a lad, aged 20, and then to the end of his days. Bob]

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. Allan Bloom, 1987.

The philosopher (or, as critics would have it, anti-philosopher) Allan Bloom was born in Indianapolis on September 14, 1930. Except for the polis (for Plato’s ideal city was to be his guide), it was an unlikely birthplace. And for such a profoundly conservative thinker, it’s an irony that his parents were social workers. But Bloom was drawn up and out of the orbits of social workers and Midwestern parochialism by his education at the University of Chicago, where he took his BA at 18 and his PhD at 23. The latter came from Chicago’s rarified Committee on Social Thought, whose leading light was the arch-conservative Leo Strauss. Bloom had a different mentor, though (the classicist David Grene), and did not immediately imbibe Strauss’s apocalyptic view of a culture in mortal crisis. Indeed, Bloom always denied that he was a “conservative,” and as a young academic teaching in Paris (at the École Normale Supérieure) he attracted a very broad (politically speaking) group of friends including Susan Sontag. That he later managed to irritate her beyond measure owed to his increasing crankiness (nicely if inadvertently conveyed by Ravelstein, a posthumous biofiction by Bloom’s adoring friend Saul Bellow), a temperamental shift best understood by reading Bloom’s most famous work, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). I have assigned The Closing to honors college seminars five times, and will again do so in Spring ’17 in nearly complete confidence that the book will irritate them beyond measure. Their problem will be that the merits of Bloom’s argument (if indeed it possesses any) are concealed by his belief that institutions like UMSL and students like them are not capable of conveying, or of receiving, anything like a true education. But provocation beyond measure is an excellent teaching device, and in that sense The Closing is an excellent book to read for students who want to be educated. ©

I’m very proud of her for what she did. She made it better for me. Adline Moody, 2015.

Essie Mae Moody was born into a sharecropper’s family in Centreville, Mississippi, on September 15, 1940. It was a hard life, but she softened its edges somewhat by taking cleaning work from neighboring “white folks” and hoped for better things through education and sports, achieving perfect grades and becoming a more than passable basketball player. At about the time Essie Mae decided that all that hard work would not be enough she changed her name to Anne Moody and as a student at Tougaloo College joined CORE and SNCC to become a recognized leader of the militant wing of the Civil Rights movement. It took courage, in those days, and there is a picture of Anne Moody sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson MS, surrounded by an angry mob of whites (young men, her own age) smearing her with condiments, as one might slather one’s hamburger. The mob was particularly outraged when she and two white companions knelt to pray and dragged Anne away by her hair. Only two weeks later, Medgar Evers, a leader of the sit-in movement, was assassinated outside his Jackson home. Anne Moody fought on, and (having already begun to write to salve her soul and sharpen her wits) produced in 1968 a prize-winning autobiography, eloquent and disturbing, Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne would fill out her elder days more quietly, first as a teacher in Canada and then as a counselor in an anti-poverty project in New York City. She never felt “at ease” there or when she moved back “home” to live with her sister Adline. Disillusioned, no longer confident of achieving meaningful progress, she concluded that she had been all her life like a leashed dog growling and snapping at her masters—who still held the leash. Anne Moody, in her youth an eloquent champion of equality, fell prey to depression, then senile dementia, and died at age 74 in 2015. ©

In the end, it turns out that [his idea of] civilization is a lunch party at No. 50 Gordon Square. Virginia Woolf on Clive Bell.

Did the “Bloomsbury Group” ever really deserve its collective title? It certainly contained within itself the (potential) seeds of its own destruction, not least a belief in the individual aesthetic so strong as to lead some of its members off on artistic goose chases, the courses of which can be followed through often snide comments in private diaries and letters. Their internecine love affairs, sometimes quadrilateral rather than merely triangular, shifted several friendships towards breaking point. But for a long time (until at least the second war) each of those fissiparous elements seemed to call forth its own strong force of gravity, and in due course the “Old” Bloomsbury Group was added to, even strengthened, by new blood. It’s possible to argue that one of those strong unifying forces was sheer snobbery, and not just of the intellectual sort, and if so the high priest of Bloomsbury snobbery was surely Clive Heward Bell, art critic extraordinaire, intellectual gadfly, and (before she became Mrs. Woolf) the sometime lover of his sister-in-law Virginia Stephen. Born into the Victorian high middle class on September 16, 1881, in a quite dreadful country house, Clive Bell soon identified his father’s and mother’s vulgarity and philistinism with a whole social order. He did not set out to destroy it by revolutionary action or even reformist politics (his inherited wealth enabled him to live a life of very industrious leisure). Rather he aimed to rise above it, and at Cambridge he found the friends and the intellectual ethos that would sustain him in this pleasant task (it was also occasionally risky, and Bell was not without courage). His wit and sensibility made him a leading if erratic art critic, his sheer productivity added to his influence in England and America, and his many friends (inside and outside the Bloomsbury Group) collectively decided to ignore, or pardon, or even to partake of, his snobberies and his vanities. ©

She devoted her life to helping women plan their pregnancies, enjoy their sex lives, and become well and happy. Helena Wright’s obituary, British Medical Journal, April 1982.

Not all late 19th-century Jewish migrants to England were poor refugees from ghetto or shtetl. Henry Lowenfeld, who moved from his family estates near Chrzanow (then in Polish Austria), became a theatre impresario and married the daughter of a Royal Navy captain. Although soon divorced, Lowenfeld provided generously for his daughters’ support and education, and both would become distinguished professionals, Margaret in psychiatry and Helena (born on September 17, 1887) in family medicine. Helena had announced at age 6 that she was going to become a doctor, an unusual ambition for a well brought up Victorian lass, and at 20 she enrolled in the London School of Medicine for Women. By 1922, as Helena Wright, she was (in partnership with her husband) a medical missionary in China for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Helena was also in quick succession a mother of four sons, enjoying sex with her husband, and musing on the benefits of birth control, at the time under the official disapproval of her employers (the Church of England), and so when the Wrights returned to England in 1927 Helena took up a new career as an energetic advocate of birth control, one who by sheer force of will won important concessions on the issue (in the 1930s) from the Bishops Conference. Wright diverged from some other birth control campaigners in her belief that women should be able to take the initiative in, and enjoy pleasure from, sexual intercourse. Nor was she interested in population control or eugenics, but rather in liberating all her “chicks” (as she called her female patients) from the “slavery of sex” and into its enjoyment. Her positions on these issues, and on abortion (which she regarded as a failure of family planning, not as a criminal act), landed her in a lifetime of controversy which only ended with her death at 95. She had retired from medical practice only seven years earlier.©

You're quite right when you think I don't feel at home here. . . Oh you lovely little Sweden . .. . Greta Garbo, letter home, circa 1926.

One of the commonest, and often saddest, stories to come out of American immigration was the loss of the old ways. Immigrants felt, or all too often were told, that to become one of “us” it was necessary to stop being one of “them,” and so national characters were shed like old clothes (the clothes went too, for when you think about it “style” is all about assimilation), the mother tongue disappeared or became the lingua franca of the grandmas, and often even the immigrant’s name disappeared along with the rest of the baggage, unspellable by immigration officials, unpronounceable by neighbors or employers, or just embarrassingly “foreign.” But surely, by the late 1920s, young Greta Gustafsson might have kept at least her last name. By then there were enough Swedes in the country that we had Swedish jokes. But Greta, born into a grindingly poor Stockholm family on September 18, 1905, and orphaned at 14, was not immigrating to America but rather to Hollywood, where for various reasons people changed their names (e.g. to Boris Karloff or to Rip Torn) at the drop of a director’s hat. And so (probably at the behest of Louis B. Mayer, who had also changed his name) Greta became Garbo, and her new surname would ironically enter the American language as a synonym for beauty mixed with mystery mixed with pathos, for everything that placed her—for a surprisingly brief time—at the very pinnacle of Hollywood popularity. When she fell from box office grace, in the very late 1930s, it proved easy for her to retire into relative obscurity, and the thrifty habits that she brought with her from her Stockholm childhood enabled her, famously, “to be let alone. I just want to be alone.” Retirement meant retirement for Greta Garbo née Gustafsson, and for her it worked well, and for over 40 years. ©

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. Roger Angell, The Summer Game.

The fairy tale convention is that step-parents are bad business, and sensible children steer clear of them. They come along out of tragedy and then make things worse. Roger Angell, who is I hope enjoying his 99th birthday today (he was born on September 19, 1917), overturned convention with a stepfather who cared for him, and a mother too. They were E. B. White and Katherine Sargent White, thrown together by an office romance (at The New Yorker magazine) of legendary depth, warmth and mutual respect. They were also masters of English prose, “Andy” (White’s college nickname) as writer, Katherine as editor. But Roger’s ‘real’ father, Ernest Angell, was no slouch, either, even though Katherine had several reasons to think so, and Roger Angell was (mainly) brought up by this activist lawyer, art collector, and paragon of civil liberties. Roger (who himself became, and still is, an editor and writer for The New Yorker), later reflected affectionately and gracefully on his natural parents, his step-parent, and several other good parents in a fine 2004 New Yorker essay “Hard Lines: Life in Rerun, Now Playing Near You.” Despite his own three parents’ generally positive influences, Roger claims that none of them taught him how to write, that he didn’t even intend to learn how to write (certainly not for a living), and the fact that he became one of our best essayists (not least on The Summer Game, baseball) was just one of those cosmic accidents that happen to us all if we are alert enough to know it. But Roger Angell does remember watching E. B. write, and Katherine edit, and thinking that wherever it happened (in the Whites’ case in Manhattan, Connecticut, and Maine) writing well was really very hard work. So perhaps it wasn’t accidental at all. Happy 99th Birthday, then, to our best living sports writer, Roger Angell. ©

The hardest thing to do is to swing quietly, with control and restraint. John Dankworth.

Jazz was born in New Orleans and like its native city it’s a mixed-up kid, tracing its parentage mainly to African-American musical traditions but also to a hodge-podge of “other” musics. It is, then, quite “American,” of several bloods and broods, and it is known throughout the world as “the” American art form. Its syncretism has helped it to integrate itself quite well wherever it’s landed, notably in Britain, where jazz has called forth a number of geniuses, among whom the best known worldwide are Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine, the only married individuals to hold those honorifics in their own rights. “Johnny” Dankworth was born on September 20, 1927, to musical parents who tried to set him off on the right feet (with piano and violin) but right through to his stint at the Royal Academy of Music the young man kept turning to jazz, inspired first by Benny Goodman’s clarinet and then Johnny Hodges’ alto sax. His talents (playing, composing, improvising) drew to him other young jazzists, and by 1950 he led an internationally recognized combo, the Dankworth Seven. The seven needed a voice, so in 1951 a 24 year old Afro-British contralto with an astonishing vocal range auditioned for that place, and the Laine-Dankworth partnership was formed. It was a congenial relationship musically and in other ways, for Dankworth had already identified himself with anti-fascist and anti-racist movements (turning down a South African tour way before it was popular to do so) and after Laine’s divorce in 1957 the two formed a marital union that lasted until Dankworth’s death in 2010. They did not always perform together, just often, but on their own or in tandem they became the identifying faces of British jazz and immensely popular with jazz cognoscenti, even in the music’s birthplace. Listen up. You won’t forget them. ©

The pair set up a concert venue called The Stables at Wavenden near Milton Keynes. I saw Gillian Welch there - memorable.

"The jazz singer only broke the news to the 400-strong audience moments before the finale of the concert, at which the couple’s children, Alec and Jacqui, also performed.
Sir John, an 82-year-old saxophonist whose career spanned more than half a century, died on Saturday in King Edward VII Hospital, London. He had been ill for several months.
Dame Cleo decided to go ahead with the show because it marked the 40th anniversary of the entertainment venue she and Sir John set up together at their home in Buckinghamshire.
The announcement of the jazz legend's death was met with gasps, with members of the audience “visibly shaken” by the news, according to Monica Ferguson, chief executive of The Stables in Wavendon.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Some contemporary literary critics have taken the difficulties of explaining an author’s intent to the absurd length of abandoning the attempt and insisting that the text (the novel or poem) is completely recreated by each new reader. Such “post-modern” crankiness is now on the wane in university literature departments. It is therefore all the more disturbing to find this view flourishing among today’s conservative Supreme Court justices. After all, those who nominated them believed that they would serve the gods of “strict construction” and “original intent,” confirming only those powers and rights enumerated in the Constitution and using the founders’ beliefs (their “words”) to interpret constitutionality through understanding the founders’ intent. But in several recent cases, our justices have proven to be the wildest-eyed of post-modernists, twisting the Constitution’s original meaning into bizarre abstractions. Their Citizens United decision extended the First Amendment’s right of free speech from persons to corporations (and one awaits their decision to secure freedom of worship to the Wells Fargo Bank, plc). And the Second Amendment (finally submitted to the states on September 21, 1789) has been used to establish the unhindered license of my fellow citizens to bear any kind of lethal weapon and to wave it in my face at the local supermarket, the movie theater, the corner candy store, or indeed in my history classrooms, giving reasoned discourse a whole new meaning. This not only shoots holes (pun intended) through the amendment’s original language but provides evidence of terminal insanity in terms of public safety. In the process, the late Justice Scalia secured his own post-modern credentials by dismissing the phrase “a well-regulated militia” as nothing more than a literary flourish. One shudders to think what other mere “literary flourishes” abide in our Constitution. ©

What a pity it is/ That we can die but once to serve our country. Act 4, scene 4, of Cato, by Joseph Addison.

These ‘anniversary notes’ function as birthday cards for Honors College students, so I don’t celebrate hangings, but for Nathan Hale I can make an exception. Nathan Hale was hanged for spying, on the orders of British general William Howe, on September 22, 1776. He was only 21. He’d learned his patriotism at Yale, where he was a star student and had participated in debates on (inter alia) the moralities of slavery, the Copernican universe, the heroes of the Roman Republic, and American resistance to British imperial initiatives. On graduating in 1773, he began a teaching job in New London. In July 1775, inspired by the American uprisings at Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill, he took a lieutenant’s commission in the Connecticut militia and then (as captain) in George Washington’s Continental Army. Washington, encamped on Morningside Heights and facing the British on Long Island, was still learning his best tactic (brief attacks and long retreats), and he badly needed intelligence on the British deployments. Hale stepped forward, received his orders, and disguised as a schoolmaster seeking work (he would know that role) was ferried across the East River to begin his mission. We know the rest. Several eye witnesses confirmed that Hale died bravely, indeed serenely, but did he really say “I only regret that I have but one life to lose from my country”? Perhaps not, but it’s a near quote from Joseph Addison’s Cato, a play often paraphrased by American patriots (notably General Washington himself and Patrick Henry), and so the Hale legend underlines our founders’ identification with a classical hero who opposed Caesar’s tyranny and chose suicide over submission. And the likelihood that Hale was betrayed by a Yale classmate in Howe’s army and hanged by a loyalist slave reminds us that, like many revolutions, ours was also a civil war. Had the British side won, the betrayer and the hangman could well have become American heroes. ©

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go. Mary Church Terrell, 1902.

In 1940, Mary Church Terrell published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. It recounted a long life (she was born on September 23, 1863) and an active one. Her parents, both of them freed by their white fathers, had elected to stay in Memphis and her father, Robert Church, was already accumulating great wealth. He was insistent that his children, male and female, would be educated, and Mary chose to go north, first to Antioch and then to Oberlin, where she majored in classics, edited the student newspaper, and was elected class poet. She was not the first black woman to graduate from Oberlin, but she may have been the first to get a master’s degree, also in classics (she became fluent in living languages too, French and German). Given her attainments and her very light complexion, she might have done almost anything with her life, but she moved to Washington, DC, married, raised two daughters, and devoted her life to teaching in black schools and agitating for equal rights and equal access. Her choice—to raise others up with her rather than rest securely within DC’s growing black upper class—was made at the urging of Frederick Douglass, whom she first met in 1888. Mary Terrell’s accomplishments owed partly to her intelligence and partly to her stamina. She became principal of three schools, taught at universities, founded professional and civil rights organizations for black women, became a syndicated columnist for the black press, and if that were not enough she joined the national women’s suffrage movement, picketing the White House and lobbying congress with Alice Paul. Mary Church Terrell lived long enough to lead the sit-ins and legal challenges that by 1953 desegregated DC’s theaters and restaurants, to celebrate Brown v. Topeka, and to integrate the American Association of University Women. ©

I think the greatest reward comes in the privilege I have had to associate with very able research people. Charlotte Moore Sitterly, interview, American Institute of Physics, 1978.

These notes have celebrated the astronomical achievements of four of the female “computers” who enriched the work of Edward Pickering (Director of the Harvard Observatory from 1877 to his death in 1919) and only received recognition if they lived longer than he did (Antonia Maury and Annie Jump Cannon thus came out from the shadows and, before they died, were showered with honors). Charlotte Moore Sitterly also began her astronomy career as a female “computer” but she enjoyed more recognition sooner. It helped that she was born later than any member of Pickering’s “harem”, September 24, 1898, in rural Pennsylvania. Attitudes had changed, and by the time she took a job at the Princeton University observatory, in 1920, it was easier for women to gain recognition. But not yet “easy.” It helped that she was a Quaker, animated by her strong beliefs in equality and in the rewards of working with others. Plus her first boss, Professor Henry Russell, was himself a talent spotter and urged Charlotte to go onwards and upwards. Most of all, Charlotte Moore had a brain and loved using it. She whizzed through Swarthmore (a Quaker college) where she starred in ice hockey, student politics, and mathematics, and (working with Russell, and co-publishing) then discovered a talent for spectroscopy and thus the physics and chemistry of stars. She applied this talent to get her own PhD at Berkeley and then return to the Princeton observatory, where she met and married a Professor Sitterly (of the physics department). But at Princeton and later as Astronomy chair at American University, she continued to publish as Charlotte Moore. And just before she wed, in 1937, in an act of truly cosmic justice, she received the Annie Jump Cannon Award, in itself a recognition by the American Astronomical Society that women, too, could reach for the stars, and should be rewarded for their successes. ©

Two years work wasted. I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it. Thomas Hunt Morgan, circa 1910.

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin got evolution right but could not pin down its mechanics. His research showed him why speciation occurred, but not how. That question was not fully settled until DNA was mapped, but way before that a Moravian monk, Gregor Mendel, did it with sweet peas in the 1860s. Not many people read the botanical musings of Moravian monks, however, so it was left to Thomas Hunt Morgan to do it with Drosophila and publish it to the world in a score of books and well over 300 research papers. Drosophilae (aka “fruit flies”) have been around for a very long time; Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in Lexington, KY, on September 25, 1866 (at about the time that Mendel was wrapping up his sweet pea work at an Augustinian priory near Brno). Morgan was educated at the University of Kentucky and Johns Hopkins and got his PhD (for work on the embryology of sea spiders) in 1890. His first appointment was at Bryn Mawr, where he found a wife (also a scientist) and continued to work on embryology, which is where he thought Darwin would be proved wrong about natural selection as the driving force of speciation. But in 1900 Mendel’s work was rediscovered, and by 1908 Morgan (now at Columbia) had decided that Drosophila’s super-quick and super-productive generational cycles made it the perfect species to test Mendel’s findings (and Darwin’s). Within five years, Morgan and his students had mapped fruit fly inheritance and in 1915 Morgan (with others) produced The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. It was, wrote Professor C. H. Waddington of Cambridge, “a great leap of the imagination comparable with Galileo or Newton.” It also changed Morgan into a Darwinian and brought him the Darwin Medal in 1924 and the Nobel Prize in 1933. But the real prize is that Morgan’s career reminds us that science advances through skepticism and challenge, not “belief.” ©

She was a generous person and a wonderful teacher. Professor Tom Blundell, Cambridge, a memorial appreciation, 2012.

Professorships were once very rare in English universities. But that Louise Napier Johnson (born on September 26, 1940) did not become a professor until she was 50 still begs for explanation, for she had long established herself as a pioneer in research and as a remarkable teacher. But she was at Oxford, where chairs were even rarer. She was a she. And she operated at disciplinary boundaries (biology and physics) and was thus (at first) difficult to place anyway. Meanwhile, she cut quite a swath in crystallography and enzymology, first with her brilliant PhD at London, then in her Yale post-doc, and from 1968 in a series of positions at Oxford, including seven years as a demonstrator and sometime fellow of Somerville. In 1968 she married the future Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam, greatly enjoyed a somewhat unconventional family life with him and their two children while she continued her killing schedule of research, publication, teaching, and (now) encouraging scientific research and education in Islamic societies, notably Pakistan, Iran, and Jordan. Finally, in 1990, she was appointed to an endowed chair (in molecular biophysics) and to a fellowship at Corpus Christi. Though Abdus Salam died in 1996 (his Nobel came in 1979) Johnson continued to do research (mainly in crystallography) and to encourage her children in their careers as foreign aid workers and administrators. Besides her chair, Louise Johnson received a raft of honors, including a DBE from the queen and doctorates from British and foreign universities. As an administrator, Dame Louise also helped Oxford to achieve more family-friendly career structures (for both fathers and mothers). Upon her retirement, in 2011, she moved to be near her son’s family and to take up some scientific admin at Cambridge University, but suffered a massive heart attack on the very day she moved and died soon afterwards. ©

An important stage of human thought will have been reached when the tormenting conflicts or contradictions between my consciousness and my body will have been factually resolved or discarded. Pavlov.

I remember several things from my General Psychology course, taken 54 years ago from Professor Solomon. His brilliant and really rather startling dismissal of the notion of “racial” differences in intelligence should have a wider circulation. And his lecture on the history of psychology won him our attention for the rest of the semester. The highlight was Ivan Pavlov and, of course, Pavlov’s dogs, creatures for whom we developed a lively sympathy and, almost, a sense of brotherhood. Not that Solomon attacked Pavlov for cruelty. Rather, the Russian was praised for his modern, empirical, objective approach to the whole business of the brain, the mind, to what made us “human.” It was a revolution, Solomon told us in the autumn of 1962, that had yet to be fully reckoned with. Ivan Pavlov, this particular Russian revolutionary, was born on September 27, 1849, the first of many children of an Orthodox priest. He was indeed intended for the priesthood, but while in seminary decided to follow his childhood fascination with math and science and enrolled at St. Petersburg. After further studies at Leipzig, Pavlov returned to St. Petersburg for the rest of his life and (inter alia) for his famous experimentation with dogs, fatal to the dogs (for their nerve structures were always examined afterwards) but enlightening enough to the world to win Pavlov the Nobel (for physiology and medicine) in 1904 and, much later, the unstinting admiration of Professor Robert Solomon. Pavlov’s devotion to science extended to his own death (in 1936), for he enlisted one of his students to observe and record his last conditioned reflexes. Despite his (courageous) public opposition to Stalin (“I am ashamed to be a Russian”), Pavlov was then accorded a Soviet state funeral, as befit this most famous of psychologists. ©

This country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they will admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by. David Walker, 1829.

A Roman legal doctrine that survived into the modern era was partus sequitur ventrem, “that which is brought forth follows the womb.” It was particularly useful in slave societies, and it helps us to understand (if not to explain) why Sally Hemmings’ children were slaves, even though they were fathered by her owner, Thomas Jefferson. But occasionally it meant freedom, so when David Walker was born (in North Carolina, on September 28, 1796) he was born free, of a freedwoman, even though his father was a slave. Walker soon found life in a rural slave society intolerable and moved to Charleston, SC, to join a larger community of freed persons, join their church (the oldest black church in America), and learn shipbuilding. That was a valuable skill, and he soon moved north to sell it in free labor market, and in Boston (from 1825) married and became a leading member of a growing community. Literate, well spoken, interested in public affairs, Walker joined some integrated societies (notably the Masons) but stayed within the black church and, as importantly, became a public spokesman for abolition of slavery and for equal rights for former slaves. Privately, it became known that when fugitive slaves arrived in Boston, they should repair immediately to Mr. Walker’s place where freedom would find a welcome. He was a writer, too, first for New York’s Freedom’s Journal and then as the author of Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (Boston, 1829). In it, he urged constant struggle, not only against slavery but against the legal structures and informal exclusions of racism. It was immediately famous, but also forever; David Walker died in 1830. David’s infant son Edward (born in the same year) lived into the 20th century and (in 1866) became the first African-American to be elected to the Massachusetts state legislature. ©

Immediate thoughts - and isn't it nice to have somewhere to express them?

Latin is so concise. Just 'partus' means 'that which is brought forth'. No wonder I struggled.

I've not seen 'repair used in that sense since listening to the song Curragh of Kildare.

'straight I will repair to the Curragh of Kildare' repair

Nice! You can't beat a good archaism every now and again David. It makes the reader stop and think. Craft teacher is our Bob!