BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

the polite caricaturist
Sir Leslie Ward, 1851-1922

Caricature should be a comic impression with a kindly touch, and always devoid of vulgarity. Sir Leslie Ward, aka “Spy”, on the proper nature of his chosen art form.

If you are a biographer aiming for a Pulitzer Prize, you want to get a holistic, finely-grained picture of your subject, a portrait. But if you use your subject to make a point, the sharper the better, that is where the caricature comes in, in prose or in crayon. There the challenge is to render him, or her, recognizable and yet distorted so as to bring into the open a defining character. But the root of the word caricature is not ‘character.’ Rather it came into 18th-century English via the Italian caricatura,meaning a ‘loaded portrait.’ Originally, Italians loaded their caricatura with animal features. In that spirit, one might make Ron DeSantis into a burly hyena or Harry Truman into a saucy donkey or Lyndon Johnson into a six-gun-totin’ centaur with a ten-gallon hat. Going too far in that direction can end you up in the grotesque (another word borrowed from the Italian, from images discovered in a buried grotto of the Emperor Nero), picturing human beings as reptilian or otherwise monstrous, but in England (where else?) a gentler school emerged and gave us very human caricatures, witty rather than savage, poking fun at rather than skewering their subjects. Such a one was Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) of whom you might almost (but not quite) say that he only ever caricatured his friends. Another polite caricaturist was Leslie Ward, born in London to artist parents on November 21, 1851. His father was a history painter, his mother a portraitist, and they were successful (and well-connected) enough to secure good commissions and good company. They sent their boy to Eton, where he was already caricaturing schoolmates and schoolmasters. His parents’ grander visions made this seem piddling stuff, so they tried to interest Leslie in architecture, but at length he got them to accept his ambition to be an artist, and they sent him to the Royal Academy to learn how. But Leslie kept on caricaturing people, and it was this talent that got him a place at Vanity Fair (in 1873) where he adopted “Spy” as his authorial name. It was fitting, for he might sketch his subjects from a place of concealment at one of his many clubs. Not too surprisingly, Leslie Ward became a polite caricaturist, witty and perceptive but not unkind. He could wound and even infuriate, but that usually owed to his subject’s thin skin, rarely to Ward’s malice, for instance with Ward’s caricature of a satiated (too chubby and very ancient) Anthony Trollope. In the end, Leslie Ward got a knighthood out of his gentle wit, something that never happened to Ronald Searle and will never happen to Steve Bell, modern English caricaturists who veered towards the grotesque and monstrous and away from the subtler (and safer?) images of the likes of Sir Leslie Ward and Sir Max Beerbohm. ©.

[Tripps]

I've been aware of these sketches for a long time, especially in the field of Edwardian racing, but never really considered them as 'caricatures'. I'd say - very expressive portraits, with some exaggeration of the body proportions.

I think Wikipedia covers that aspect quite well, and certainly better than I could express it - with my handicaps.


Later, as he became more accepted by his social peers, and in order not to offend potential sitters, his style developed into what he called "characteristic portraits". This was less of a caricature and more of an actual portrait of the subject, using realistic body proportions.[

[Stanley]

I'd never classified his work with Searle or Bell..... An interesting point of view.....

[Stanley]

Music and sound, sound and light.
Mary Ellen Bute, 106-1983

This new medium creates a world of color, form, movement, and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux. Mary Ellen Bute, 1956.

An upcoming St. Louis Symphony Orchestra program features Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and so reminds me that composers often use music to paint pictures. Everyone’s favorite Holst essay is ponderous, jolly Jupiter, but there are six other planet-portraits (Holst omitted Earth and didn’t know about Pluto). He was beaten to the punch by Dietrich Buxtehude’s harpsichord suites on the planets (apparently seven suites, though Buxtehude could have known of only six planets). On pictures made from music, almost everyone knows about Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), wherein seven symphonic pieces are set into a cartoon film. Back when we had LP disks, designers of record covers often had a go at ‘visualizing’ the music therein. And “impressionism” is an aesthetic that we can see or hear, as we choose. But today who knows about Mary Ellen Bute? Her moving pictorial images of music beat Disney to the punch by over a decade, her first surviving work dating from 1928 (speedy work, since synchronous sound was invented only in 1927). Mary Ellen Bute was born in Houston, Texas, on November 22, 1906, and began as a painter, training in her home town and then in Philadelphia. Frustrated by the limitations of her chosen medium, she began to incorporate sound with light in the theater (learning stage lighting at Yale), and was then inspired to try film by the work of the German animator Otto Fischinger. So Mary Ellen Bute was ready to roll when the sound track came into being. She tended more to the abstract, using all sorts of geometric shapes (including, it seems, ping pong balls) and new technologies like oscilloscopes, finding in abstraction a better way to ‘pictorialize’ musical scores (Fischinger had used snapshots and later, like Disney’s musical animations, cartoon figures). I read this morning that, in my misspent youth, I very likely saw one or another of her short films, fillers shown just before box office blockbusters), but if so I have no memory of any. She produced many shorts and some longer films, some of them still available on-line, and usually ‘picturing’ classical music, Wagner for instance (she used passages from Tannhauser in her Synchrony #2, 1935). But she experimented, too, with atonality, and often worked in collaboration with leading composers (Leopold Stokowski, for example). The more I read about her, the more I want the SLSO to ‘do’ a son et lumière featuring Bute’s work. Perhaps the program could start with Bute’s Spook Sport (1940, 8 minutes), her abstractions set to synchronize with Camille Saint-Saëns’ La danse macabre. A good date would be All Saints Night. Outlandish costumes and sweet hot chocolate? ©

[Stanley]

Frankenstein incarnate.
Boris Karloff, 1887-1969

I'd been in Hollywood for ten years and no one had heard of me except my creditors. Then in 1931 I played the monster and a career was born. Boris Karloff, 1957.

I so easily associate Boris Karloff with horror films that his photo portraits come as a surprise. No ‘monster,’ he was a man of ‘dark good looks.’ But then so was the actor who later played the paterfamilias (gentle and just) in TV’s long-running Bonanza series. Indeed, shed of his Frankenstein makeup, Karloff could almost be Lorne Greene’s brother. And by the way both of them did come to Hollywood by way of Canada. But Greene was born there, in Ottawa, of Russian Jewish immigrant parents who’d already adopted the surname ‘Green.’ Boris Karloff was born William Henry Pratt, in south London (Dulwich) on November 23, 1887, of an English middle class mother whose Aunt Anna had been tutor to the children of the King of Siam. He got his dark good looks not from her but from his Anglo-Indian father, Edward, who’d been in the Indian Civil Service, administering the salt tax for the British raj. So in a way both his parents were children of the empire, and this might have set out William’s life path. William was well-enough educated for that, and his elder brothers both became senior imperial bureaucrats, but somehow William took a wrong turn, got involved in acting, and emigrated to Canada where, between laboring jobs, he acted in touring companies. It was there, aged about 25, that he adopted the stage name of Boris Karloff. That may have been to establish his ‘foreign-ness,’ but not his identity as an icon of horror and suspense. He played a great variety of roles, in western Canada and (of all places) in Minot, North Dakota, and then in Hollywood. Those dark good looks, though, did start to define him in several dramatic roles in the silent era. Some parts were better than others (he appeared with Douglas Fairbanks and Lawrence Olivier, for instance), but nothing really clicked. It may have been at the suggestion of Bella Lugosi (another horror-film icon) that Boris Karloff turned into a genre-identifying star, first in the classic Frankenstein (1931), then in several ‘Mummy’ films and a ‘Dracula’ or two (Transylvania was the sort of place a “Karloff” might have come from). It’s not clear that everyone knew what a hot property he’d become. Universal Studios trademarked the Frankenstein monster’s costume even before they gave Karloff a contract. But very soon he was right up there with Lugosi and Lon Chaney in terms of horror. After World War II eclipsed the horrors of the silver screen, Karloff returned to a wider variety of roles, even comic ones, and became an acknowledged authority in his crafts. Wealthy enough, and enjoying a new ‘senior statesman’ identity, he retired back to London. There he died in 1969 of a combination of the horrors we now associate with tobacco. ©.

[Stanley]

A quite extraordinary lens grinder.
Baruch de Spinoza, 1632-1677

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his meditation is not on death but on life. Baruch de Spinoza.

I share (I hope) only few things in common with P. G. Wodehouse’s fecklessly comic character Bertie Wooster. But there are at least three. First, I have never read anything by Baruch de Spinoza. Secondly, I have on occasion gone out of my way to avoid doing so. Thirdly, I am often embarrassed by my neglect of the thinker regarded (by Bertrand Russell) as “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.” Baruch de Spinoza was born in the Jodenbuurt (“Jewish quarter”) of Amsterdam on November 24, 1632. His parents were refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, come to Amsterdam for its relative tolerance. So Baruch came of age when these Sephardic exiles were learning (again) how to be Jewish, having concealed so much in Spain as to forget. Indeed in Amsterdam there was something of a Jewish revival going on, and young Baruch, a clever lad, took part in it. But only up to a point. For various reasons (including family necessities) he suspended his Jewish studies but, his curiosity still burning brightly, then came under the influence of a defrocked Jesuit who had also come to tolerant Amsterdam where he could continue to study, and teach, a new rationalism (which, today, we call the Enlightenment). Absorbing and extending these radical ideas, Baruch de Spinoza made himself into an internal exile. He was attacked by a knife-wielding fanatic at his synagogue and then in 1656 suffered the formal punishment of cherem (a sort of excommunication or ‘reading out’ from the community). Spinoza did then adopt a Latin name, Benedictus, but it was something of an irony for he was not accepted by the Christian community, either. Nor indeed could he bring himself to join. Instead, as a philosopher, Spinoza thought things out as a private scholar: a learner, a teacher, a discussant. Many (orthodox Jews and orthodox Calvinists) thought of Spinoza as an atheist; some still do, but he has also been seen as one of the most God-centered of all Enlightenment thinkers. For several years exiled from Amsterdam, he was offered a chair at Heidelberg but feared it would compromise his independence to think on his own about relationships between freedom and necessity and between spirit and matter. Spinoza made a few friends (fewer still would acknowledge him), and he made ends meet by grinding quite passable optical lenses. All that powdered glass killed him in 1677, aged only 44. Spinoza left behind him foundational works in philosophy and ethics, now regarded as humanistic classics. He also helped Gottfried Leibniz travel further towards calculus, another thing I’ve avoided. Like Bertie Wooster, I never progressed beyond algebra. ©

[Stanley]

King Charles II's unhappy consort.
Catherine of Braganza, 1638-1705

Alas poor woman! she asks for my pardon? I beg hers with all my heart; take her back that answer. Said to be among the last words of Charles II, a message to Catherine of Braganza, 1685.

Now that Britain has another King Charles (III). one is tempted to look back at his ancestral Charleses (I & II), neither of them hugely successful monarchs. Charles I got himself chased out of London and then, in 1649, beheaded. His son Charles II was “restored” in 1660, a rhetorical sleight of hand backed by the fiction that it was the 12th year of his reign. #II did manage to hold on to his head, and his throne, a kind of success which owed much to his slipperiness. So he died of natural causes in 1685. He could be, indeed, a very merry monarch, as when he let the Quaker George Fox get away with addressing him in Green Park in intimate terms (as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’) and calling him “Friend Charles.” And he let Lord Rochester, one of his boon companions, get away with calling him much worse. But there is no doubt that his reign was a troubled one, and that some of his more telling troubles owed to his marriage. Like his father before him, Charles II married a Catholic princess, and unlike his father he subjected her to the humiliations of a number of amours, acknowledged and otherwise, in and out of court. That long-suffering princess was Catherine of Braganza, born in Portugal on November 25, 1638. Their marriage, long plotted, was made official on May 21, 1662, just two years after Charles’s triumphant return to London. She brought with her a renewal of an old alliance and, more to the point, imperial possessions in North Africa and on and off the coast of India. She also may have brought tea to England, perhaps (in the long run) her most consequential dowry, but she did not bring Charles an heir (despite at least three pregnancies) and may not have enjoyed sex at all. Given Charles’s past habits the result was inevitable: a string of mistresses, three of them very public and consequential, and (for Catherine) the humiliating experience of acknowledging them at court. The queen bore up bravely, on the whole, and as a good dynast the king remained loyal to her. This brought him yet more trouble, for Catherine was a devoted and observant Roman Catholic. Just like Charles I’s Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria, Catherine roused the fears of an increasingly Protestant political nation. So Catherine’s mere presence sharpened the political crises that plagued Charles II’s last years and then, in 1688-89, ousted his brother James in the century’s second (and more “Glorious”) revolution. But Charles’s dynastic loyalties outlasted all this. Catherine remained on a Civil List pension until her death in 1705. Even there she was outlasted by two of Charles’s old mistresses, Barbara Palmer and Louise de Kérouaille, lasting insults to an unhappy queen. ©.

[Stanley]

Biblicist, feminist, abolitionist.
Sarah Moore Grimké, 1792-1873

History attests that man has subjected woman to his will . . . He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and says that the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior. Sarah Moore Grimké, 1837.

Fully to understand American racial slavery is to study it in the contexts of other American oppressions and exclusions, some racial, some economic, some based on gender. Age, too, I suppose, although as I approach 80 I’d rather ignore that one. The Mississippian novelist (and world Nobelist) William Faulkner did just that and concluded that slavery was maybe the most fatal of several Original Sins, intertwined (in his fictional history of ‘Yoknapatawpha County’) with the dispossession of the natives and the rape of the land. Sarah Moore Grimké, born on November 26, 1792, followed a similar route. Her journey began when she was a little girl and witnessed her personal slave-servant, another child but a black one, whipped for an infraction that was really Sarah’s. Little Sarah already understood enough of her world to try to board a northbound steamer, to go somewhere slavery didn’t exist. A little later came another blow. Her wealthy father, patriarch of the Grimké clan of planters-slavers, was also a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. Sarah was perhaps the cleverest of his white children, and on her he lavished an intensive home education (in law, languages, and history). She also had the run of his private library. No doubt he meant to praise her when he told Sarah that, had she but been a man, she would have been the greatest lawyer in South Carolina. So Miss Sarah added the oppression of women to her own list of Original Sins. In this she also remembered her several black half-siblings (for Judge Grimké was not wholly averse to having sex with his properties) as well as that childhood whipping. And so Sarah Grimké would become one of her age’s most prominent abolitionists, and feminists, and educationalists. Her path to freedom and equality was also marked by deep religious conversions, first to Presbyterianism and then to Quakerism, for in her God-centered world abolitionism and feminism required biblical warrant and spiritual energy. Along with her younger sister Angelina, another refugee from oppressions, Sarah Grimké caused quite a stir. Not only was she a radical abolitionist and reformer, but she played these roles in public, speaking to ‘promiscuous’ audiences (that is audiences of men and women). Angelina and Sarah also confronted their own family’s slaver history by taking care of their brother’s black progeny, adopting them, and launching two of them (Francis and Archibald) on their own reformist careers. These were two more of the Grimké family who came to understand oppression in several of its forms, and were the stronger for it. ©

[Stanley]

Let us now praise famous men.
James Agee, 1909-1955

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above. James Agee, Katherine Hepburn’s best line, delivered to Humphrey Bogart, in The African Queen (1951)
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I first encountered Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1966, required reading in a graduate seminar on modern US social history. Its matter-of-factness about rural poverty (prose by James Agee and pictures by Walker Evans) must have been, I thought, hugely influential. But (as a matter of fact) it was a flop. Commissioned in 1936 by the editors of Fortune magazine, it was rejected by them once they’d read it, and was then taken up by Houghton Mifflin. It was published in book form in 1941, on the eve of American entry into WWII. By then, Dr. New Deal had become Dr. Win the War, and white rural poverty was off the priority list. The book sold poorly (below 1,000 copies), was remaindered, then withdrawn. My edition, in 1966, was a revival, an academic project as a documentary on the devastations of poverty. But it was more than that. The title itself (“let us now praise famous men”) came from the Bible and from an ancient literary genre wherein lives were made exemplary for their courage, for their triumphs against the odds, for their self-sacrifice. Agee and Evans gave these people (sharecroppers in Alabama’s cotton country) new names and without any fanfare made them into heroic figures. Where some saw only faults and failures and impotence, Agee and Evans presented families who made do with the little they had, men, women, girls and boys who played their game as well as it could be played. In all this there was much of the personality and past life of James Agee, born in Knoxville, Tennessee on November 27, 1909. He was not born poor (far from it), but his father’s early death (in 1920) put James in the care of the Episcopalian Order of the Holy Cross at St. Andrews School for Mountain Boys. There he developed a lifelong friendship with Father James Frye and Mrs. Grace Frye. Theirs was a tutorial-pastoral relationship, rather in the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography (think Pilgrim’s Progress), and it produced Agee’s other “classic” text, Letters of James Agee to Father Frye, published posthumously in 1962. James Agee died of the vices he could not correct (alcohol and tobacco) in 1955. Besides his classics, he gained fame as a critic (for The Nation), screenwriter (The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter) and as a scholar of Hollywood’s great comics, Chaplin and Keaton. Like the families he portrayed in Famous Men (he called them the Gudgers, the Ricketts, and the Woodses), James Agee led an exemplary life ‘such as it was.’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has now been in print for a very long time, and this morning I see that it has been joined by Agee’s letters to Father Frye. My guess is that they should be read together. ©

[Stanley]

I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.
Berry Gordy III, born in 1929

There aren’t enough people who care about the future. They are too busy worrying about today and what they can grab now. Berry Gordy III.

If you can follow your family tree back through, say, four or five of its branchings, you are likely to find oddities. One of my favorites makes second half-cousins out of Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, and James Earl Carter, 39thpresident of the USA. Not that they have a great deal in common, but they share a great-grandfather, the white Georgia planter James Thomas Gordy. Thus they embody our country’s mixed-up ethnic history. We call Jimmy Carter ‘white’ and we call Berry Gordy ‘black’ because they had (in this connection) different great-grandmothers. Carter’s was James Gordy’s wife. Berry Gordy’s great grandma was James Gordy’s property. It’s just possible they also share a gene for longevity, for Berry Gordy is only six years younger than Jimmy Carter. Berry Gordy (Berry Gordy III, to be exact) was born in Detroit on November 28, 1929, his parents (Berry II and Bertha Gordy) having moved north, from rural Georgia, to find greater freedom and better prospects. Berry II did well by his large family (there were 8 kids in all), gaining enough prosperity as a shopowner, builder, and printer to instill in his son the ambition to get richer quicker, which our Berry Gordy tried to do through prize fighting. That didn’t work out well, and Gordy drifted into the army (field artillery) where, in the Korean War, he began to find his niche by playing a portable organ for his unit chaplain. Back in Detroit, now a veteran, Gordy began to write songs and then, fatefully as it turned out, recorded one, sung by Jackie Wilson. With some help from his family (parents and siblings) he then invested $800 in a recording studio and began calling himself Tammy Records, then Tamla, and finally, in 1960, Motown. After all, that’s what Detroit was. Along with all that, in close succession, came The Miracles, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas (who performed at my baccalaureate party, in Franklin Field, Philadelphia, in 1965) and of course The Supremes. You really cannot do much better than that, but Berry Gordy’s little fire kept burning, now in Los Angeles and with film production too, with a biopic on Billie Holiday and then Lady Sings the Blues (starring Diana Ross of The Supremes). All in all, we could say that Berry Gordy was more successful, in his fields, than his second half-cousin, but given Jimmy Carter’s distinguished after-life that’s debatable. Berry Gordy retired from Motown and his other enterprises in 2019, aged 90, and as far as I know is still going strong at 93, despite being loaded down with many prizes and honors, and way more money than he might have made as a boxer. ©

[Stanley]

Shaman, scholar, and weaver.
Essie Parrish, 1902-1979

These things we do speak of who we are . . . We are not just one person; we are many. In just one there is the whole tribe and our ancestors too. Essie Parrish, quoted by her daughter.

The natives of northern California’s coastal and woodland regions were called the “Digger Indians,” and theirs was indeed a hunter-gatherer culture. Among their main staples were nuts and tubers, stored in elaborate woven baskets and stored in dry holes. So they dug to harvest and they dug to save; “digger” was descriptive. It was also perjorative. Among 19th-century writers who described them mercilessly we can include Mark Twain and Henry Adams, both of whom should have known better. Luckily for the Kashaya, one of seven clan groups speaking the Pomo language, they ran into someone who did know better, Charles Haupt, a German born in Saxony about 1828 who came to California in 1848, possibly drawn by the lure of gold or driven out by the failure of Germany’s 1848 revolutions—or both. Instead of gold he found ranching, settled near Fort Ross, and married a Kashaya woman. Through her, or from his liberal German good nature, or both, Haupt came to admire the Kashaya and, concerned that they might be overwhelmed or submerged, invited them to make their home on his ranch. Much later, his son (Charlie, Jr., in 1919) sold the ranch to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and it became the core of the Kashaya Pomo reservation. Another preserver of Kashaya culture was Essie Parrish, born in the Haupt Ranch settlement on November 29, 1902. It may have been that by the time Essie came along, the Kashaya were undergoing an important cultural change, from a tradition of male spiritual leadership to female shamans. This included the integration of tribal customs with Christianity in the form of a movement called Bolu Maru. If so, Essie took her lead from Annie Jarvis, an acknowledged Bolu Maru leader and healer. Whether or not that was the case, Essie Parrish experienced her first vision as a little girl, aged 6 or 7, on her way home from a mission school. Dreams which arose from this vision soon made her a spirit woman and soon a leader in ceremonies, healings, and traditional dances. Upon Jarvis’s death in 1943, Essie became a Bolu Maru leader, strengthened by her expertise in traditional Kashaya crafts (notably basket weaving) and by her projects with anthropologists to preserve (and record) the Pomo language. A cultural separatist, she advised against intermarriage with whites; as a realist. she urged the Kashaya to integrate with the dominant economy. Her baskets are collectors’ pieces; her scholarship survives in a Pomo dictionary, in prize-winning film documentaries (at least one by her), and in academic studies of Pomo history. She died in 1979, survived by her vision of Kashaya culture. ©.

[Stanley]

Prost!!

The "Reinheitsgebot", November 30, 1487

Man soll das Bier nicht vor dem Kater loben. Or, ‘don’t praise your beer until you’ve experienced the hangover.’ German traditional saying, sometimes used as a toast.

On November 30, 1487, Duke Albert IV of Bavaria promulgated a new beer law, the Reinheitsgebot. At first it applied only to Munich but in 1516 was extended to all of Bavaria. Reinheitsgebot translates as “purity command,” which was an early instance of PR “spin”. In 1487 (and, for that matter, 1516), Europe was still subject to periodic famine, and restricting brewers to barley only might, in times of dearth, safeguard the supply of wheat and thus control the price of bread, which for Duke Albert was a more pressing concern than the purity of beer. Indeed the last sentence of the original ‘purity’ law makes it clear that brewers could substitute other malted grains if market forces required it. Famine, scarcity, the high price of bread could still bring instability (the French Revolution would prove that), but gradually European agricultures became productive enough to avoid the Malthusian nightmare of population control by death and dearth. By the time the German states finally united (in 1871), purity was the thing. Bavarians loved their beer (or their hangovers). So if the Bavaria’s royals, the Wittelsbachs, were to give way to Prussia’s Hohenzollerns in a new German empire, they could at least insist on pure Bavarian beer becoming the gold standard for all German brewing. And so it happened. The Reinheitsgebot became imperial law, or at least an edited version of it (even the Prussians had to admit that yeast had a place in the brewing process, along with malted barley, hops, and water). It would be too much to say that the Germans went to war on the issue, but come the Common Market (in its various manifestations) Germany did attempt to make all “beer” manufactured or consumed in Europe conform to those old purity standards. Fear of famine was long in the past, and maybe purity was too, but German beer had become a valuable trademark for some big companies, and they were anxious to preserve their reputations and their profit margins. Even American Budweiser ® had to conform, for a while, with a special European “Bud” made only of barley, hops, and water: if, that is, Budweiser wanted to call it “beer.” Several lawsuits and company takeovers later, that restriction no longer applies. Even some German brewers have let down their guard. Lowenbrau ® makes an “original” by the old rules, thus implying that some other of their beers are “not quite.” Bitburger ®, on the other hand, still brews all its beer by the 1487 standards, famine (and hangovers?) be damned!! But of course Bitburger charges way more than 1 Pfennig per (pure) liter, the top price permitted by the edict of 1487. As for Budweiser, it’s brazenly gone back to brewing from rice or “other grains.” ©.

[Stanley]

What's in a name?
Alicia Markova, 1910-2004

A ballerina’s life can be glorious, but it doesn’t get any easier. Alicia Markova.

I do not follow the ballet, but even I am aware that there was a time when many ballerinas thought it best to adopt new names to achieve their ambitious goals. So—aged only 13—Edris Stannus (1898-2001) became Ninette de Valois. Peggy Hookham (1919-1991) tried ‘Fontes’ for a while, but from 1936 danced as Margo Fonteyn. Comparatively speaking, Lillian Alicia Marks didn’t have quite so far to travel; she danced first as Alicia Pavlova but later became Alicia Markova. Each became famous enough that we have forgotten their given names. The lives of all three intertwined at various points, not always happily, but each separately and all together had much to do with the rise of English ballet both within the English arts community and in the world of dance. All three enjoyed royal patronage and became DBE (Dames of the British Empire). All three were involved with some of the most famous figures in modern ballet history (e.g. Diaghilev, Ashton, Molin), and many consider that all of them danced their finest, definitive roles as the prima in the classical romantic ballet Giselle. At different times, of course. Lillian Alicia Marks, aka Dame Alicia Markova, was born in London on December 1, 1910, the eldest of four daughters of mining engineer Arthur Marks and his Irish wife Eileen Mary. A frail girl, prone to illnesses, Lillian took to dancing for strength and health, urged on by her mother and a fierce governess nicknamed ‘Guggy.’ Much to their (and her) surprise and pleasure, she thrived (psychologically and physically) in rehearsal and on stage, and was inspired to forsake pantomime for classical ballet in 1919 when she saw Anna Pavlova (BTW that was Pavlova’s ‘real’ name) dance at the Queen’s Hall. Lillian soon commenced formal lessons, came to the attention of Serge Diaghilev, and signed on to his Ballets Russes as ‘Alicia Markova,’ aged just 14. At about this time, her father’s financial troubles made it obvious that her future prosperity was to be in ballet, but it’s likely that she’d already made that decision. She toured with Diaghilev’s company until he died (in 1929), and a few years afterwards came under the tutelage of Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton. For three decades Markova was the British ballerina, often touring (in the USA for the war years). She early gave way to Fonteyn at de Valois’ Royal Ballet, but until Fonteyn teamed up with Nureyev was perhaps the better known. Markova last danced Giselle in 1955, then retired in 1962 to become ballet’s elder stateswoman, instructor and impresario, in both the USA and UK. These eminences she sustained until her death in 2004. ©

[Stanley]

Bell, Doyle, Holmes, Moriarty, and Watson.
Dr. Joseph Bell, 1837-1911

All careful teachers must show the student how to recognize accurately the case. Dr. Joseph Bell, lecturing at Edinburgh University.

Joseph Bell, Scottish surgeon, was born in Edinburgh on December 2, 1837. Since all three of his children died rather young—in their 20s, I believe—he was last in the lengthy Bell line of surgeons. It all began with Joseph’s great-grandfather Benjamin Bell (1749-1806), continuing through his grandfather (the first Joseph), and his father (another Benjamin). All four (and you can throw in an uncle and a great uncle) were instrumental in making surgery into a modern science. All these Bells were educated at Edinburgh University, and each became, in due course, presidents of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Beginning with the first Benjamin’s encyclopedia, each also published important texts on surgery. Two of them, our Joseph and one of his great uncles, enjoyed royal patronage as physician-in-attendance whenever the reigning monarch should be in Scotland. For the great uncle, that was King George IV, for our Joseph it was Queen Victoria, a much longer medical appointment which included occasional residences at Balmoral Castle. Balmoral (which in Gaelic means “little hut on a great patch of land”) was purchased for the queen in 1848 by Prince Albert, who first toyed with the idea of using modern building designs and materials (Albert was inspired by the Crystal Palace at the Great Exposition of 1851) to erect a really new castle as his little hut, but finally settled on Scottish gothic. After Albert’s early death, Victoria became really attached to the place and, during her long mourning, to Albert’s Balmoral ‘gillie,’ John Brown, a fishin’ and huntin’ guide who (after Albert’s untimely decease) graduated from being leader of the queen’s pony to being her companion, confidant, and (famously) her “good and faithful servant.” All this shows what a deep rabbit hole one can fall into by following a mere thread of facts. Some connections are consequential, and some are merely circumstantial. As Dr. Joseph Bell knew, this is a vitally important difference, and he often spiced his medical lectures with demonstrations of his forensic abilities to learn much about even casual strangers but more especially his surgical patients, where the difference between circumstance and consequence can be a life or death matter. Dr. Joseph Bell became famous for this ability, which at times seemed almost supernatural, and indeed he was consulted by Scottish police on several spectacular murders (and volunteered a solution to London’s “Jack the Ripper” cases). Much more consequentially, Dr. Joseph Bell became the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, the most notorious deducer in literary history, for one of Dr. Bell’s auditors at Edinburgh was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” ©

[Stanley]

A woman of many parts.
Octavia Hill, 1838-1912

We all want quiet. We all want beauty. We all need space. Octavia Hill.

Octavia Hill was born in Cambridgeshire on December 3, 1838, the word ‘reformer’ written into her genetic code. Her father James was a banker turned miller turned early socialist. His third wife, Octavia’s mother Caroline, had come into the household as governess of Hill’s elder children. She and Hill married on the death of wife #2, and Caroline lavished on Octavia the same Pestalozzian treatment of a child-centered, progressive, useful education. It’s relevant to Octavia’s future that she grew up in a household of females, for most (8 of 10) of her siblings were females, and soon enough James retired into the background as a bankrupt. But she was a rather odd feminist. Reform was her most important inheritance, and her first job was making painted toys for children in a north London (Finchley) workhouse. In Finchley, Octavia came under the influence of the polymathic John Ruskin and the saintly Anglican priest (and social gospeler) Frederick Morris. Another contribution came from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (3 vols., 1851), a review of London’s nether nine-tenths and an analysis of how and why they were poor and, too often, remained so. Mayhew himself was a wit (indeed he was a cofounder of Punch), but Octavia read him in deadly earnest, and humor seems not to have been a leading element in her persona. From these roots, and through her own extensive experience, she became a woman of many causes. Hill was a reformer but not merely a social reformer. She also set out to reform the poor. The vices of the poor may well have been social in origin but they were still vices, individual failings. Of Octavia Hill’s many reforms, her most characteristic were her housing associations, the first one in Marylebone, London where, with the financial backing of John Ruskin and other investors, Octavia became landlord of a range of decrepit houses occupied by decrepit individuals. Both houses and tenants were her raw materials, and she whipped the housing into shape by training the tenants in the building trades. It wasn’t rocket science, but the aim was to produce better housing for tenants with marketable skills to whom Octavia could rent the premises at fair rates. It was a model used, in the early 1960s, by a reform administration in Philadelphia, the city of tough sisterly love, and it’s not a bad idea. Octavia’s rent collectors, by the way, were women who served also as social workers, interviewing and advising their client-tenants. Octavia was also a cofounder of England’s National Trust, a different landlord with different goals, but then she always was a busy woman with many aims. ©

[Stanley]

He talked too much.
Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead. Therefore we must learn both arts.
Thomas Carlyle, 1850.

Every great once in a while I run across a story that seems so poetically true that, ever afterwards, I am reluctant to trace its origin, for fear of finding that it never really happened. One such tale was that Einstein was inspired to think up his relativity theory while riding in a tram. As the car passed by a park, he noticed the trompe l'oeil by which distant trees appear to jump behind nearer ones, ‘Eureka!!!!!! Light bends!!’ Whereupon the young genius sat down to work out the mathematics of it. I have since been assured, more than once, and by experts, that it didn’t really happen that way. An even lovelier myth (to which I still adhere) is about the first (1833) meeting between the American Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Scot Thomas Carlyle. Asked later about their impressions, each thought that the other “talked too much.” “True” or not, it did lead to a long correspondence which ended only with Carlyle’s death in 1881. Thomas Carlyle, born in Ecclefechan, Dumfries, on December 4, 1795. was possibly the more interesting and certainly in 1833 the more eminent of the two, but they had some things in common, including their shaping influences on American and British thought and culture. 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 enthusiastic foreword, the book was published in Boston before it was printed in Britain. But by 1836, ensconced in London and 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 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” who, a cut above mere mortals, might reshape history. In that sense On Heroes bears both odd similarities to and stark contrasts with Emerson’s 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” History’s verdict may be that both men did indeed talk (and write) too much. But Jane Carlyle’s comment, that Emerson’s sojourn with the Carlyles (in Edinburgh, by the way) was like “the visit of an angel”, reminds us that here was truly a meeting of the minds, instructive both in its commonalities and in its contrasts. ©

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Rose Valley, PA, a place to visit.
Mildred Scott Olmsted, 1890-1990

Any good or kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again. Traditional Quaker saying.

Rose Valley is one of the more interesting towns in Pennsylvania. It’s a small place (don’t blink or you might miss it) but it has a history which makes it one of Philadelphia’s odder suburbs. It started as a Quaker settlement, part of William Penn’s “Holy Experiment,” and two of its houses date from that era. Its streams made it a good place for watermills, flour and then fabrics, but in 1900 the mills became victims of fossil-fuel power. At this point an eccentric Quaker architect bought about 80 acres of Rose Valley. He’d already founded one new town, suspiciously called “Arden” (in a New Jersey woodland), and now saw Rose Valley as better place for a utopian settlement. Repurposing old buildings and erecting new ones, Field made an “Arts & Crafts” community. A couple of other cranky architects joined him, and other misfits too. They secured a small loan from Swarthmore College to start their work, and soon the old mills and a couple of remodeled barns were joined by distinctive new houses, carefully crafted ones, gathered closely together. They were pleasingly domestic, some with poetic names, and they attracted all sorts. One of the old barns was rechristened “Thunderbird Lodge,” and in 1921 a newly-married couple moved into it, both from wealthy Quaker families. The husband, Allen Olmsted, was a judge, despite which he was also a cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union. The woman he asked to love him was Mildred Scott Olmsted, born on December 5, 1890. Educated at Friends’ Central in Philadelphia, she’d majored in history at Smith, graduating with honors, and by the time she’d married Allen she had already a reform history, including relief work in Paris for World War I soldiers and refugees. So she brought with her, to Thunderbird Lodge and Rose Valley, some momentum as well as a dowry. Allen and Mildred raised three children, further remodeled the old barn, and made a “natural garden” for it to nestle into. Mildred still found time to continue her peace work, piece by piece, and was influential in the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, which was why she’d gone to Paris in the first place. She became the League’s president on the eve of another World War, and then (not daunted by that conflagration, either) cofounded SANE after the war. Mildred kept making good trouble for a long time, dying only just short of her 100th birthday. Her peace papers, appropriately enough, are now housed at Swarthmore College. Thunderbird Lodge, first named to make a connection with native American culture, is now the main museum of Rose Valley, PA, one of those places you might want to visit. ©

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King of the cowpokes.
William S. Hart, 1864-1941

If motion pictures never did any more than perpetuate some of the things in our American life that are being lost in the dust of time, they would be worth their weight in gold. William S. Hart.

Gene Autry had his Champion, Roy Rogers had his Trigger, Hopalong had his Topper, Clement Moore (the Lone Ranger to you) his Silver, and William S. Hart had his . . . Fritz. Not a very memorable name for a star’s horse, one must to say, nor very ‘American,’ and when the US went to war in 1917 Hart renamed Fritz. But what was the horse’s more patriotic name? I don’t know the answer, but when the former Fritz died (in 1922), it was buried at La Loma, California, on Hart’s ranch and under a big monument which still stands. When you visit there, perhaps you can find Fritz’s second name. But then who was William S. Hart? He was the first big movie cowboy, and he was actually christened William Surrey Hart. He was born in Newburgh, NY, on December 6, 1864, the son of immigrants (English father, Irish mother). Hart did find his way west, in his teens (with his parents and sisters) to the Dakotas, but didn’t stay very long. Instead, he took up acting, and after a while with touring companies he became well known for his Shakespearean roles. In 1899 he acted in the stage premier (in New York City) of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur. Next, Hart (in his 30s but still living with his birth family) acted (in season) in the newly-fashionable Asheville, North Carolina, where it’s possible that the Vanderbilts watched him be, or not be, Hamlet. Now, however, Hart became fascinated by western myths and acted on stage and then in silents as a western hero. Some pioneer western heroes had been real cowboys, a tenuous occupation, others marshals, and perhaps a few outlaws, but if Hart had any taste for western realities it was in collecting souvenirs (Billy the Kid’s six-shooters, for instance) and collecting friends like some survivors of the OK Corral gunfight: the Earps and maybe Bat Masterson. In his big films, Hart played to the myths, but as a taciturn (these were all silents), rather stern and moralistic hero. When he wasn’t playing a marshal, he dressed pretty much like a cowboy. He did most of his own stunts, too, sometimes with Fritz (once they almost drowned together in a cave scene), and tried his hand at directing. Off screen, Hart played the same moralistic role, taking a hard line in the Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921. Buster Keaton, a friend of Arbuckle’s, took revenge on Hart in a comic film (The Frozen North, 1922) that portrayed Hart as a hypocrite (thief, wife beater, bully, etc.) Hart may well have been one or more of these, but he lived long enough to become a respected Hollywood elder. At his death in 1941, Hart was buried in Brooklyn, a long way from Fritz the horse. But perhaps, in reality, they’d never been that close. ©

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All the tissues of animal life are nothing but transformed cells.
Theodor Schwann, 1810-1882

The whole organism subsists only by means of the reciprocal action of the single elementary parts. Theodor Schwann, 1839.

Among the prizes Prussia gained from the Congress of Vienna (1815) was the Duchy of Westphalia. In terms of German history, it was a mixed bag: a Catholic western half and a Lutheran east. Absorption into Protestant Prussia thus presented a problem for the devoutly Catholic Theodor Schwann, born in Neuss on December 7, 1810. A goldsmith’s son, he'd shown great scientific promise in his Jesuit schooling in Köln. Should he pursue his ambitions in Prussia? Or should he move south to safely Catholic Bavaria? Schwann split the difference. He obtained his first degree “at home” at the University of Bonn, newly non-sectarian, but traveled south to Catholic Würzburg to begin his medical studies. Then, in 1834, he finished his medical degree at Berlin, the very heart of Prussia. One might conclude that for Schwann, science and not religion was the trump card. That is how he started, supplementing his private practice income with lab work in a Berlin anatomical museum. The latter soon engaged most of his attention. Working with good microscopes and a better mind, Schwann found in the “cell” the basic unity of all animal life, persisting from the fertilization of the individual egg or ovum right through to the astonishing diversification of animal tissues: bones, muscles, teeth, brains, nerves, even nerve sheathings and toenails. All were constructed of cells, and yet each cell came, indubitably, from that single-celled ovum. To Schwann the scientist it looked like a puzzle worth unpacking, which he proceeded to do. He’s widely recognized today as the founder of cell theory, and along the way he also made basic discoveries in animal digestion (he named “pepsin” and hinted at the existence of a gut biome), in the processes by which yeast helped sugars to ferment into alcohol (Louis Pasteur would build germ theory on this basis), and in embryology, detailing some of the mysteries of cell differentiation while the animal (or human) was still “embryonic.” These discoveries may have caused inner crises between his science and his faith. There is much dispute about this, but one clue might be that as Schwann made these scientific advances he also moved back from the Protestant East to the Catholic West. First to a chair at Bonn, which though non-sectarian was at least located in a Catholic city, and then finally to the Catholic University of Liège, in Belgium. Along the way he withdrew from ground-breaking research (and from teaching) in anatomy and embryology to work, instead, on devising useful laboratory tools and procedures and writing (philosophically or theologically) about the unities in all creation. Schwann retired from Liège in 1879 and died, full of years and honors, in 1882. ©

[Stanley]

He bought up Detroit
William C. Durant, 1861-1947

Deal Maker. The title of a 1999 biography of William Crapo Durant.

Ransom Eli Olds (1864-1950) gave us the Oldsmobile, his most successful model the “Curved Dash.” David Dunbar Buick (1854-1929) copied the Dash but called it a Buick. Louis-Joseph Chevrolet (1878-1941) drove racing cars for Buick but then founded his own company and made it eponymous. These men had a few things in common. They were clever with metal and inventive with motors. Though two were foreign born (Chevrolet in Switzerland and Buick in Scotland), all three of them fetched up in eastern Michigan to start their car companies. In the long run, though, what may be more important is that they were all, sooner or later, taken over by William Crapo Durant, born in Boston on December 8, 1861, but translated into eastern Michigan by his mother, Rebecca, who just happened to be the daughter of Michigan governor, Henry Crapo. Of course William might have gone anywhere. Like most leading capitalists of his era, he was born to wealthy parents. His commercial life began humbly enough, working in grandpa’s timber business and then, for a time, selling cigars in Flint, MI. But we all grow up sometime, and at 25 he went into a carriage-making partnership, the Durant-Dort Company. This was wildly successful. Build a better horse-drawn carriage and the world will beat a path to your door. It got Durant thinking about mobility, and made him a millionaire at 40, whereupon he bought into a new partnership with David Dunbar Buick, assuming full control in 1904. Buick retired into the background and died a poor man, but Durant added retail horse-sense to Buick’s assembly-line production and soon Durant’s Buick was outselling Olds’s Curved Dash (and Henry’s Ford). Almost that quickly, Durant formed a holding company (with his own and borrowed capital) and purchased Olds’s business. He called his new company General Motors, and thereby hang several other tales, including his further purchases. These included Cadillac (named after the French founder of Detroit and a sort of surplus activity of Henry Ford’s, who had his own marque to pursue) and then Pontiac. Pontiac was named after an Ottawa chieftain or a Michigan city, as you prefer. Durant would lose control of General Motors, regain it, and then lose it again, but throughout “GM” held to Durant’s original retailing goal, which was to identify each marque with a particular market, and so Durant’s brands graduated from the rather common Chevy up to the aristocratic Cad. Durant himself would end up nearly bankrupt, dying in 1947, but well before that he had cleverly constructed his own mausoleum, a cadillac of catafalques, in a New York City cemetery not a million miles from Wall Street. It bears his marque. ©

[Stanley]

The cello and the nightingale.
Beatrice Harrison, 1892-1965

And as we kissed and said goodnight
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. From “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” 1939.

Everyone should know about the nightingale that sang in Berkeley Square, one of the world’s great love songs. Written in 1939, it has been recorded a zillion times. I most like Vera Lynn’s 1940 recording, sung (as it were) in defiance against the Luftwaffe. The lyric is said to have been inspired by a 1923 short story. “When the Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” but another possibility is a 1924 live broadcast of a duet between a Guarneri cello and a nightingale, not in Berkeley Square (nightingales are rural birds) but in a private garden in Oxted, Surrey. The cello piece, answered contrapuntally by the nightingale, was “Chant Hindu” from a Rimsky-Korsakov opera. There were thousands of listeners on the night, and it was a sensation, repeated annually for years and also recorded. The cellist was Beatrice Harrison, a cello virtuosa who made a very long journey from her birthplace (the Northwest Frontier of British India) to that Surrey garden. She was born on December 9, 1892, with engineering in her DNA from both sides of her family. But her mother loved music, and in their Indian home trained Beatrice and her three sisters into fine musicians (a violinist and a couple of pianists besides Beatrice’s cello). So talented were they that when the family returned to England Beatrice and one sister trained at the Royal College of Music. Beatrice gave her first public performance in 1907, and was invited to perform privately at Buckingham Palace in 1908. The royal family was much taken by Beatrice’s talent, and later Princess Victoria purchased Beatrice’s Guarneri. Soon Beatrice toured in Europe and the USA, becoming in several venues the first female cellist to play (solo or in concerto) this or that cello piece. Back in England she gained the patronage of the conductor Thomas Beecham and the composer Frederick Delius. So when Beatrice came to the BBC to say that she’d played to a nightingale, who’d sung back, the BBC was ready to listen. Outside broadcast equipment was set up in the Harrisons’ garden, and the broadcast went out. Beatrice’s career went on flowering. It was her sensitive recording of Delius’s Caprice and Elegy that followed Chamberlain’s BBC broadcast declaration of war against Hitler’s Germany in September 1939: every bit as evocative, surely, as Vera Lynn’s anti-blitz ballad. Sadly, it’s since been admitted that that 1924 duet was a fake. The nightingale was scared off by the BBC’s crew, so a bird imitator was called in. In later broadcasts, a ’real’ nightingale did turn up, but I can’t help being disappointed by this revelation about the début performance. ©.

[Stanley]

Oh dear Bob! Another of my childhood beliefs shattered!

[Stanley]

Who needs a chip, anyway? Think binary!
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 1815-1852

Imagination is a noble faculty. It renders earth tolerable, it teaches us to live in the tone of the eternal. Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

Great poets do not necessarily make good parents. If that’s not an adage, the briefest glance at Lord Byron’s records (as a poet and as a parent) might make it so. But it wasn’t his poetry per se that made him such a flighty parent. In this, as in his sexual experimentation, he merely followed along the Byron family’s male line, his father, grandfather, and at least one uncle being as famous for sexual shenanigans as for their military exploits. Our Byron, the poet, had three acknowledged children, all girls: Ada, Allegra, and Medora. Of the three, only Ada was ‘legitimate,’ and then in the narrowest sense, for Byron the poet ordered her mother Annabella out of his house when Ada was only 5 weeks old. This little girl, née Augusta Ada Byron, but later Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born on December 10, 1815. Though she lived only 36 years, she was to become part of an intellectual circle that included Charles Dickens, the author; Mary Somerville, a pioneer woman scientist and polymath, Michael Faraday, physicist, and Charles Babbage, mathematician. All this owed nothing to her father—but not much to her mother, whose main concern was to show enough interest in Ada to retain custody, “show” being the word for Annabella wrote ‘fake’ letters to give an appearance of motherly care. Such ‘parental’ love as Ada got came from her maternal grandmother, the Honorable Lady Milbanke, who doted on her and, as requested by Annabella, contracted tutors to advance Ada’s education. Among them was a Cambridge mathematician, whose expertise coincided with Ada’s childhood interest in what she called “analysis” or, occasionally, “computation.” As Ada’s natural gifts matured, she became Charles Babbage’s valuable assistant in several things, not least in his efforts to design a computational machine. Since it worked on a binary principle (yes versus no or 1 versus zero) Babbage and Ada are sometimes called cofounders of modern digital computing. This seems a bit of a stretch (too many crucial advances in technology were still required). Otherwise Ada, Countess Lovelace, used her mathematics to invest in gambling ‘systems’ and offload her resulting indebtedness to her husband William King, the 8th Baron King. She gave him three children and her own long-suspended family title as the Earl of Lovelace: for she was, after all, very well connected in her own right. Ada also may have been as amorously adventurous as her natural father but she was not, as far as I know, a poet. To complete that circle, Ada Lovelace seems to have been an effective and affectionate parent. Genes don’t always tell a person’s whole story. ©.

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Frank Hardy, Joe Hardy, and Nancy Drew.
Harriet Adams, 1892-1982.

Nancy didn’t cry much, but when she did, she cried in private. From Nancy Drew mystery, “The Stolen Kiss.”

Paulette is 80 today, and today’s birthday story will curl her teeth, indeed the teeth of anyone who (as we both did) grew up in the 1950s. For us, that was in Des Moines, IA, when we and our friends, while still in grade school and into junior high, were avid readers of mystery novels, among them the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drews. This marked an important unity amongst us (we all liked adventures in which youngsters showed their mettle) but also a division, seemingly ineradicable. Boys followed the adventurous teen sleuths Frank and Joe Hardy, and boys didn’t wear brassieres. Girls played softball and thrilled at the independence (nay, the toughness) of a Nancy Drew who, if she didn’t play hardball, could ride a horse, play a par round of golf, and still cook better than Betty Crocker. That Nancy spoke French put the lid on it. In Des Moines, boys were boys and girls were girls, right down to their books. Only thing was, the Hardy and Drew series were produced by the same syndicate, plots outlined by the same persons, and the books’ authors were all “ghosts” and thus at least somewhat ungendered. The original evil genius (no doubt “grooming” us all for transgender lives) was Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930), who built up a huge publishing business by inventing plots and characters and then hiring ghosts to fill out the scripts. Except for the fact that it was in New Jersey, it was a lot like Hollywood. Stratemeyer started with the Rover Boys and the Bobbsey Twins. His first Hardy Boys came in 1927, and Nancy Drew came along in 1930, the year of his death. These were such good ideas that when his daughters Harriet and Edna took over the business they continued to run with them. Harriet Stratemeyer was born on December 11, 1892, which gives her feature billing today, but also she was quite a lot like Nancy Drew. Her parents wanted her to grow up a proper young lady, and she managed that but with a Nancy Drew spin: a sportslady who liked to climb trees and roughhouse, a girl who had a mind of her own and took it to college (Wellesley, in fact), and then returned home, married a Mr. Adams (in 1915), birthed and raised four kids, and worked her way into her dad’s business by editing ghost writers’ scripts and then supplying plot lines and character notion for a veritable stable of Stratemeyer writers, none of whom were called “Franklin W. Dixon” or “Carolyn Keene.” Harriet did some of the Hardy Boys plots, but her real love was Nancy Drew, characters and plots—for which she hired no fewer than 29 different “ghosts.” The most prolific of these was Mildred Wirt, a Toledo journalist who was, really, very similar in temperament and behavior to Nancy Drew and, when one thinks about it, to Harriet Adams. And Toledo was not that far from Des Moines. ©

[Stanley]

Charity begins at home?
Ephraim Alex, 1800-1882

Mind the Gap! Repeated announcement in London Underground stations.

After many centuries of dispersal into so many corners of the world, it is hardly surprising to see many distinctive Judaic cultures. So when Jewish migrants came together in a new place, they often found it as difficult to tolerate each other as to win toleration from their gentile neighbors. Such stories abound whether we look at Minneapolis or Manhattan, St. Louis or San Francisco. It was true in London, too, where the early in-migrants, Sephardic Jews from Iberia, were sometimes at odds with new Ashkenazi settlers. That they all still felt a people apart is made evident by their geographical concentration: not within hearing distance of Bow Bells but within walking distance of the Great Tabernacle. Even then, in 1883, an informal self-census of London Jews identified 26,000 as “native,” 21,000 as “foreign,” and then further divided both those groups into Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and immigrant stock from eastern Europe. And these 47,000, we now know, were about to face a flood of new in-migration from Tsarist persecution. Luckily for all concerned, several leading unifiers were at work. One (who styled himself “reverend”) was Aaron Levi Green. By preaching sermons in English, he strove to make sabbath services less strange to the ‘native’ English and more helpful to London’s Jews (whether they were native, foreign, Ashkenazi, flotsam, or jetsam). Another unifier was Green’s friend Ephraim Alex, a second-generation immigrant born in London on December 12, 1800. Alex was probably of Ashkenazi origin, for his father had immigrated as a practicing dentist, and Alex became one too, first in Blackfriars and then in more fashionable Westminster. Prospering himself, and among the more successful of Jewish assimilators, Alex became interested in helping the poorest Jews, the most recent immigrants. In 1859, working from a committee of the Great Synagogue (including delegates from two other synagogues), Ephraim Alex became the first president of the Board of Guardians for the Strange and Foreign Poor. It built on an earlier (1753) effort, but then London’s Jews had numbered only 7,000. Now they were nearing 50,000, and about to be inundated by thousands more fleeing the pogroms. Of course it was for “strange and foreign” Jews, not Gentiles, but given the generally private nature of Victorian social reform it should not be seen as excessively “tribal.” It won the enthusiastic approval of London’s Lord Mayor, and of Alex’s friend the Reverend A. L. Green. One imagines that Green’s memorial tribute to Alex (in 1883) was delivered in English, albeit at a Jewish cemetery. ©