BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Build a better customer list and the world will beat a path to your door.

I do not consider a sale complete until goods are worn out and the customer still satisfied. From L. L. Bean’s first advertising circular, 1912.

I’ve long had an interest in the L. L. Bean Company. It’s not proprietary, but over 50 years I’ve spent a lot there. Much of my information about the company comes from their catalogs. While they sell to the here and now market, they’re proud of their past, and in the Bean’s catalog I have read, too often, the story of how the founder, Leon Leonwood Bean, invented the Bean boot. I’ve never bought a pair. Their leather uppers and rubber bottoms still seem, to me, an unnatural marriage. Now I learn that Bean’s first experiments were, indeed, duds. The stitches kept pulling, and the rubber cracked. But thereby hung the tale of Bean’s ultimate success. L. L. Bean was born in Greenwood on October 13, 1872. It’s inland Maine, and rough country, not too far from the border with New Hampshire, and as a kid Leonard learned to love it, huntin’, fishin’, and trappin’, even making a bit extra by selling traps, but he was orphaned at 12 (his parents died only four days apart), and Bean spent the rest of his life as a Maine urbanite. Insofar as that’s possible. He worked first in a Bangor creamery, then in an Auburn clothiers. He married Bertha in 1898 and moved into her home town, Freeport, where he worked in a dry goods store. It was there that the poor boy made good. He hunted and fished when he could, including even in the long spring thaw when Maine is awash for weeks with melting snow and icy slush. That’s when he had the bright idea of a leather boot with a rubber bottom. His first rubbers were taken from the dry goods shelves, the leathers and stitching provided by a local cobbler. But perhaps his best idea was to use, as a customer list, the addresses of out-of-staters who had bought Maine fishing and hunting licenses. These folks had money to burn, as the boy Bean had found when (aged 12) he’d sold a deer he’d shot to a couple of unsuccessful dudes who could then go home, to Manhattan or wherever, and tell hunting stories. Bean’s second-best idea was to promise 100% refunds if his boots didn’t work. And when many of them didn’t, he paid up. But he kept searching for better rubber and better stitching, and his customers kept coming back, spending their old refunds on new product lines, and Leonard Leonwood (that’s probably a birth-certificate mistake for Linwood) Bean graduated from the basement of the dry goods store to his own building in Freeport, with his own staff, and his 100% refund guarantee. They still do that, if one has a Bean’s account. I now buy Bean’s slacks and shirts, mainly, townie gear, but I still use Bean’s fishing tackle, and I still have my L. L. Bean canoe paddle, all six feet of it, which came to me in England by a circuitous route. ©.

[Stanley]

"Tomorrow is our permanent address."

“there is some shit I will not eat” -from “i sing of Olaf glad and big” by e. e. cummings (1931).

I was introduced to the poetry of e. e. cummings in Freshman English, I think, and saw him as a writer of several attractions. This was not only for his casual disregard for prescriptive grammar (notably punctuation and capitalization) but also, and especially, the irreverent and rebellious content of his poems. Not only did cummings’s Olaf utter the immortal line above, but he was a conscientious objector, too, who did suffer for his dissent (horribly and graphically). Then there was cummings’s mocking dismissal of the folk hero Buffalo Bill Cody who could kill pigeons (and Indians?) bang-bang-bang (or “justlikethat”):
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
Fury, rebellion, anarchy, mockery. There they all were, the four horsemen of cummings’s apocalypse, spread across the page against all the rules of poetry, never mind grammar, indecent, outrageous, unpatriotic. But the ‘real’ Edward Estlin Cummings was different, more complicated, harder to (pardon the pun) pigeonhole. He was born in Cambridge, MA, on October 14, 1894, a child of upper-crust Unitarian parents. His dad was a Harvard professor (later a prominent clergyman) whose child rearing rules followed the precepts of the family friend William James, and who, like Emerson before them all, believed that genius might lurk in every child. So of course they encouraged Edward’s precocious talents in writing, and watercolors, and much else that the boy did. Their indulgence was rewarded in 1915 when Edward graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and then paid down, like a mortgage, by his life-long devotion to their memories. In some of his later poetry, more conventionally spelled and pointed, it can be difficult to determine whether “Father” refers to the elderly professor dad (who in 1926 died horribly in a car-train crash) or God the Father Almighty (for whose gifts the poet was also grateful). There was also the E. E. Cummings who, in politics, shifted ever rightwards and—in between poetry readings—offered public praise for Senator Joe McCarthy. You can call ‘tail-gunner Joe’ many things, but in no way could you confuse him with that wonderful, defiant Olaf, who was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
Edward Estlin Cummings, iconoclast poet but also painter and playwright, lived a varied life, which ended, period, on September 3, 1962.

[Stanley]

One of the queens of jazz.

Now if you want somethin' good, you mustn't knock on wood
Just get a good man to look up under your hood.
---From “How Do You Do It That Way?” (1926), Victoria Regina Spivey.

Among my historical lacunae, I am sorry to say, is the ‘Victorian Age,’ during which (in Britain) the great queen was rarely amused, and (in the USA too) laces were straight, legs covered (even piano legs), and sex not spoken. There was an underworld bursting with impolite laughter and erotic fancies, but within the altar of the home sex was used only (as that old anti-monarchist Ben Franklin had recommended) for health or offspring. Victoria herself had health enough to birth nine children in 17 years. But in between, I am learning, she quite enjoyed sex. Historians have read between the lines of her diaries and letters to conclude that Victoria was an enthusiastic (sometimes tempestuous) lover. With, of course, her beloved Albert, and probably no one else after the Prince died: not even Mr. Brown. It’s somehow appropriate, then, at least poetically, that an American singer who made sexiness an essential part of her act, was christened Victoria Regina Spivey. She was born in Houston, TX, on October 15, 1906. This was not too long after the ‘real’ queen died. The name itself was likely an expression of her parents’ pride and ambition, not a prediction of the low-moan singing that would secure her fame and ensure her recording successes. But there’s no doubt they wanted Victoria to be musical. Her dad, Grant Spivey (named after the great general?), was a popular local musician, and Victoria and her sisters soon joined him on stage, as singers to his fiddle, Victoria at age 7. Soon she was singing on her own, too soon, perhaps, in Houston dives and brothels. Then she moved to Dallas’s Lincoln Theater (another name to reckon with for southerners of color). Victoria’s fame preceded her to St. Louis, where in 1926, aged only 20, she signed her first recording contract, with Okeh Records, then in the process of becoming a “black” label. And Victoria Spivey (sometimes singing as “Queen Victoria”!!) already had her throaty style, suggestive lyrics punctuated by moans and sighs, which she carried with her to Chicago and New York, singing with the likes of Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington. Along the way she went through four husbands, partnering with the last of them, Len Kunstadt, to establish her own company and record label. I have no idea what she ‘really’ thought about sex, but she was in herself as canny as Victoria the Queen. Victoria Regina Spivey was good at what she was, jazz singer and businesswoman, and smart enough to sign a young guy from Hibbing, MN, to his first recording contract. I don’t know whether he signed as Dylan or Zimmerman. But the names don’t matter. ©.

[Stanley]

"I'd like to be remembered as someone who entertained."

[Jessica Fletcher] was the sort of woman I like and, therefore, I liked playing her. Angela Lansbury in an NPR interview, 2022.

Angela Lansbury died last year, provoking a flood of eulogies which made her out as a woman of superhuman virtues. Of course ‘eulogy’ derives from the ancient Greek for ‘praise’ (more precisely, ‘good speech’), so must be taken with salt. There’s a great Mark Twain quotation about someone else’s funeral (he couldn’t attend, but wrote to endorse it) that dismisses the genre as post facto wishful thinking. But Lansbury was preternaturally good at being Lansbury: daughter, wife, mother, actress, producer, and in the end stateswoman for a whole industry. And we paid her for it. At her death she was worth north of $70 million, and it could have been much more than that. That ‘deficit’ owed partly to her willingness to spend on herself. But much of her private largesse went on her children and step-children, especially when they needed it, and in her mature years (a great many) she became an icon of public and private charities. This may owe to her rather odd beginnings, in London, where Angela Lansbury was born (on October 16, 1925) the daughter of George Lansbury. He was a wealthy timber merchant, a leading member of the Communist Party, sometime mayor of the borough of Poplar, conscientious objector in WWI, and public campaigner for women’s rights. Early on in her career, it was claimed that Angela’s birthplace was indeed Poplar, a notoriously poor borough, but she later fessed a nativity in posh Regent’s Park. WWII and the Blitz sent teen-aged Angela to the USA, in comfortable quarters, but when money ran short she took up acting, with some singing and dancing, and in Hollywood she was so young (17) that she had to be accompanied by a guardian when at work in studio. After a short first marriage, she wed the English actor Peter Shaw in 1949, a marriage which lasted until his death in 2003. Meanwhile, her career had its ups and downs, one of the latter coinciding with pregnancies and childbirth. When she returned to acting, still in her 30s, Angela found herself cast as middle-aged, once as Elvis Presley’s mother. She dealt magnificently with this “problem,” especially on stage, with landmark roles as Auntie Mame (in Mame, of course) and as mother ‘Rose’ in Gypsy. The world knows her best as the ageless Jessica Fletcher on TV in Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 19 years, latterly with Angela as producer. But her varied and vigorous talents still showed on stage and screen, and if she ever retired I don’t remember it. Her last public roles were as Lady Bracknell (“perfect!”: 2019), and then (even better) as herself, in the 2022 film Glass Onion, thus proving that you can’t keep a good old woman down. Then came the eulogies. ©

[Stanley]

The novel as prophecy.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)

What are we to make of Congressman George Santos (R-NY)? Politically speaking, he’s kept alive by a very odd set of circumstances, a complicated tale in itself. But the underlying problem is biographical, more precisely autobiographical: what has Santos made of himself? He’s a fabulist, and in most of his fables he is the lead character. So he has provided us with several autobiographies. The ones I know (I suspect we haven’t yet heard them all) seem rather shallow fictions, not a one of them likely to produce a good American novel, let alone a great one. That is one of several great differences between Representative Santos and another American fabulist, Nathanael West, who made himself into a real novelist with Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and, even more emphatically, The Day of the Locust (1939). Both were strange stories, and there might have been many more, for he already had a million. Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein, October 17, 1903, in Manhattan. His parents had immigrated from the western fringes of the Tsarist empire, made themselves a prosperous life in the USA, prosperous enough to send him to a summer camp, which West the novelist later called “Camp Paradox.” The stories that came out of that suggest that he didn’t enjoy himself much. Nor did he like high school, where (passively-aggressive, perhaps) he dropped out, but where he also forged a better record for himself, one which got him into Tufts. When Tufts expelled him, he made up yet another identity (reality-based on a cousin also called Nathan Weinstein), and attended Brown University. There he gained audiences for his stories—many about himself—and nurtured an ambition to become a writer. In New York and then LA, he found time to do this (and some raw material, too) working as a hotel night clerk. Along the way he adopted his WASPish name and found a WASPish wife, Eileen McKenney (also a writer), and became a not-too-successful script writer for Hollywood studios. West’s novels and stories didn’t sell well, at the time, and he found work only on ‘B’ movies. Although his virtues as a writer were recognized by others, an odd bunch that included Dashiell Hammett and S. J. Perelman, and he was later “rediscovered” in the 1950s, West seemed a dead-end kid in 1940 when he ran a stoplight in El Centro, CA, causing a crash that killed both him and Eileen. But there is something strangely prophetic in Miss Lonelyhearts; The Day of the Locust is all about prophesy; and I think it very safe to say that George Santos would not have surprised Nathanael West. ©

[Stanley]

A tale of two copyrights.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. From Moby-Dick, 1851.

For years I bragged that I had never read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This proves, I suppose, that a boast can be a kind of self-deprecation. I claimed to be the only Americanist in Great Britain who would admit to such a shocking ignorance. Then we returned to the USA, and as I was reshelving our books, I discovered marginalia in my wife’s copy of Moby Dick that proved I had, once upon a time, read the whole thing. So braggadocio must turn to confession. Moby-Dick is today recognized as a masterpiece, the first shot (there have been many subsequent ones) at writing the ‘Great American Novel.’ But it was first published in London, on October 18, 1851, as The Whale (in some ways a more fitting title). But thereby hangs another tale, a story concerned with royalties and copyrights and not with the daemonic quest of the lightning-scarred Captain Ahab to take revenge upon nature itself. Melville dedicated the American edition (published a few weeks later as Moby-Dick) to Nathaniel Hawthorne, his newfound friend. Indeed he credited Hawthorne for the novel’s genius. I think highly of Hawthorne’s fiction, but it seems more likely to me that Hawthorne, already a veteran of transatlantic publication, urged Melville to be sure to secure both British and American royalties. For in terms of English language publication, piracy was the name of the game. Expanding literacy and exploding populations created huge markets, and new technologies made it possible to rush literary treasure across the ocean (in either direction) and into publication, with all profit to the pirate, none to the author. Several American publishing houses reaped huge dividends from the works of Charles Dickens. Ironically, Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” was one of the stolen treasures, sold in the USA by several Scrooges who (of course) retained the author’s cut. Dickens’s first American tour (in 1842) was undertaken partly to address this problem. Dickens’s failure to secure his rights (and his money) soured him somewhat, and darkened his reflections on lack of character of the new western republic. Americans didn’t respond well to Dickens’s critiques and found it easy to see him as yet another grasping old-world monopolist. So, whether advised by Hawthorne or inspired by Dickens, Herman Melville went for a British copyright. And he got one. But The Whale sold very poorly. Today you can pick up The Whale for only $215,000—from a bookseller in Pasadena!! But in 1851, averse to risk taking on such a strange book, the British publisher had to remainder most of the 500 copies it printed. Melville had his British copyright, but he didn’t live long enough to benefit from it. ©

[Stanley]

A Rhode Island radical.

A Woman’s Place Is at the Top. Title of a Hannah Kimberly’s 2017 biography of Annie Smith Peck.

Early Rhode Island was a heat sink for its more orthodox neighbors. Founded by the Anabaptist Roger Williams, Rhode Island early became a refuge for religious radicals of several stripes, including one Joseph Peck, who moved there in 1638, probably as an exile from Hingham, MA. But by the time Annie Smith Peck was born in Providence, on October 19, 1850, the state and the Pecks had settled into a quieter respectability. Her father was a successful lawyer, and her three elder brothers all fitted well into Rhode Island’s upper crust. All were educated at Brown; George became an MD; John an engineer and merchant; William stayed with academics to become principal of Providence Classical High School, still highly selective and then highly private. But their kid sister Annie may have harbored some of that old Rhode Island radicalism, for after attending an exclusive girls’ academy we find her taking classes at Classical High before that school officially embraced coeducation. But girls still couldn’t go to Brown, and Annie didn’t; instead she went to Rhode Island Normal to prepare for life as a school teacher (then about the best prospect for an independently-minded female). After Normal, Annie moved west, on her own, to teach Latin and mathematics at Saginaw, MI. But she still harbored higher ambitions, and enrolled in classics at the University of Michigan shortly after that institution opened its doors to women. She left Ann Arbor with a BA (Classics) and an MA (Greek). She then taught Latin at Purdue (where she was the first female professor of anything). In 1884 she again kicked over her traces to move to Europe take up archaeology. She proved herself at that well enough to return to academic appointments (at Purdue, then Smith) as professor of archaeology. But that wasn’t all. At Athens Annie discovered a deep and abiding interest in mountaineering. This wasn’t your typical ladies’ sport, and Annie didn’t follow it typically. Rather, in 1895, when she became only the third woman to climb the Matterhorn, Annie wore trousers. People didn’t know whether her achievement, or her costume, deserved more mention, but Annie went on climbing for the rest of her life. In 1908, aged 58 and very suitably equipped, she climbed Peru’s Huascarán, then thought to be the highest peak in the Andes. The least surprising thing about her astonishing life was that Annie was also an ardent campaigner for women’s rights. Atypically, Rhode Island had been a bit slow to ratify the 19th amendment, but then states, like Annie’s brothers, do become more set in their ways as they age. Annie Smith Peck avoided that. She climbed her last peak at 82. ©

[Stanley]

A childhood hero.

Still water runs deep. Saying associated with Mississippi River piloting.

There were several reasons for my youthful antipathy to apartheid, among them my grandfather’s rich store of anti-southern jokes, my parents’ ‘unfortunate’ experience (1947) on a plantation in the Mississippi “Delta,” and my great-grandfather’s Civil War letters. But the sharpest of all came on October 20, 1951, with the “Johnny Bright Incident” at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State). Bright played football (quarterback in the ‘T’, tailback in the single wing, linebacker on defense) for Drake, and he was the Missouri Valley Conference’s first black footballer. At Lewis Field, Bright was attacked off the ball several times. Despite a broken jaw, he kept on playing, throwing a 60-yard touchdown pass, until he was finally pulled from the game. Drake played top flight football, and Bright (after stellar seasons as an underclassman) was predicted to become, in his senior year, the first black winner of the Heisman Trophy. All now lay in ruins, in Stillwater, but thanks to the Des Moines Register’s good reporting and great photography, it became national news. Don Ultang’s “machine-gun” camera recorded the attacks moment by moment, while news stories made it clear that the ‘incident,’ if not a plot, was predictable. The A&M student newspaper had advocated action against the very idea that a player of color (not the words they used) might pollute the pure playing fields of Oklahoma. Bright recovered soon enough by Thanksgiving to play in his last game for Drake. Of course he performed majestically, his jaws wired shut and his weight down 30 pounds, for he was a Des Moines martyr-hero. The mayor proclaimed it “Johnny Bright Day” and the Drake stadium was packed. Bright was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles but he’d had enough of the USA, so he went to Canada where, at Calgary and then Edmonton, he became one of the great players in CFL history and, after retirement, a beloved middle school teacher and principal. And why not? Besides being an accomplished performer, he had been a good student. Indeed, he’d been a student of my dad’s, at Drake, and in the spring before the “Johnny Bright Incident” Bright had attended my Cub Scout “pack” as its Guest of Honor—and at my suggestion! Glory day indeed!! But another lesson, too. When I urged dad to “tell” Bright to attend, he would only “ask” his student to consider it. The day remains one of my fondest grade school memories. In Edmonton, today, there is a Johnny Bright School (k-9). At Drake, there is a Johnny Bright stadium, and Drake’s two-year program is housed in the John Dee Bright College. Southwards, the water remains still and runs deep. Oklahoma State didn’t even apologize until 2005. John Bright died in 1983. ©

[Stanley]

The man who put the junk in food.

It’s when I’m happiest that I have a junk food problem. Britney Spears.

Did you know that in the home of the brave we celebrate a “National Junk Food Day”? It comes around every year on July 21. In 2024 this will be a Sunday, so on our Day of Rest we can wallow in salt, fat, and starch. If it gets to be too much, we can wash it down with carbonated water flavored with whatever and made habit-forming by high-fructose corn syrup. The more saintly ones will need to wait until after church. I discovered this years ago in The Smithsonian, a magazine that (like its parent institution) proclaims that its mission is to provide us all with “the knowledge and tools” we need to fashion a positive relationship with the world around us. So much for mission statements—unless you include obesity, decayed teeth, and hyperactivity as essential elements in coping with life. While I don’t think there’s an International Junk Food Day, there is a case for changing our Junk Food Day to October 21. This would help us to mark the birth date of William A. Mitchell, who was born in rural Minnesota on October 21, 1911. Mitchell grow up to become an inventor of some of our more infamous calorie-packed treats, with over 70 patents to his name, mostly for ‘invented’ foods. It all started, fittingly enough, when the teen-aged Mitchell worked the night shift at a local sugar beet factory. This may have given him a passion for what he called “food science,” and indeed he did become a qualified chemist, with a Master’s from the University of Nebraska. He suffered serious burn wounds there, in the university’s ag experiment lab, but you can’t keep a good man down. Most of his inventions came after he joined General Foods, in 1941, where he immediately fashioned a synthetic substitute for tapioca, then in short supply because of Japan’s Asian “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Sweetened and flavored, it went down a treat, but Mitchell’s most famous junk food inventions were Tang (1956) and Cool Whip (1967). He also vastly improved Jell-O, a much earlier innovation. Tang became almost a cult drink when NASA selected it for space-flight diets, and I imagine we all know about Cool Whip. He also invented Pop Rocks (1961), a crystalline candy which incorporated high-pressure nodules of CO2. These latter exploded when one sucked on the crystals, no doubt shattering tooth enamels, but didn’t really catch on at General Foods, a company which (after all) had its pride to think of. Since Mitchell lived to a grand old age (he died in 2004), one has to think that he didn’t eat a lot of this junk. But who knows? In our knockabout world of fad foods and sweet treats, one man’s poison can be another’s meat. ©.

[Stanley]

Robber baron and folk hero.

It costs money to fix things. Collis Potter Huntington.

Collis Huntington was right about that, although what he had in mind was not DIY but the rising price of bribery in industrializing America. To control this inflation, Huntington once suggested that politicians should publicize their prices, so one might know ‘up front’ the costs of fixing things in one’s favor. Huntington’s ‘fixings’ were often successful, although not when he tried to divert federal money to his scheme to make Santa Monica the main harbor of the Port of Los Angeles. He spent enough cash to get a bill drafted in the US Senate, but there it tanked. One reason was that his inveterate foe, Senator Stephen White (D-CA), added a rider that required Huntington’s proposed port to be open to all carriers (ships and railways) and at set prices. But a ‘free market’ was NOT what Huntington had in mind, and the bill foundered. So San Pedro remained (and still is) LA’s main seaport. All that remained of that particular Huntington project was Santa Monica’s “Long Wharf” which, now deprived of public subsidy, fell into disuse and ruin. Elsewhere Collis Huntington left many marks on the economic landscape, a clutch of railways (three running coast to coast) and a successful publicly-financed port project at Newport News, Virginia. It would be too much to say that all of them were made possible by government money and private bribery, but by the late 1880s Huntington had made himself into one of the USA’s most hated villains, truly a “robber baron.” But he was also a hero, one of the few ‘barons’ who could plausibly claim that his life story was one of rags to riches. Collis P. Huntington, self-made man, was born in “Poverty Hollow,” a district of small-holdings in Harwinton, CT, on October 22, 1821. The family was poor enough that at one point Collis and a brother were taken out of Poverty Hollow and placed with more dependable farm families. Then, like many New Englanders, they moved west, first to western New York, where they ran a successful store. Then Collis moved all the way west, a 49er, but not to find gold—rather to sell provisions and tools to gold diggers, and that’s where Collis ran into Leland Stanford, Matthew Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. Together and then apart (after Collis axed Leland), this “Big Four” remade California with railways (the various “Pacific” lines), bought legislators, sold watered stock, monopolized railway construction, and enriched themselves. Today we know them by their charities, including Stanford University and the Huntington Library. Among the least of these gift horses was Collis’s memorial chapel in Harwinton, a gothic confection devoted to his mother and to his poverty-blighted youth. Like the Long Wharf, it no longer exists. ©.

[Stanley]

She swam the Channel!!

I am not a person who reaches for the moon as long as I have the stars. Gertrude Eberle.

The 1920s were remarkable. It was the aspirin age, apparently for its hangovers, which happened despite Prohibition. It was the jazz age, when young white folk learned the pleasures of “slumming” in Harlem clubs. On the distaff side, women began to vote, but with no discernible effect unless you count Warren Gamaliel Harding’s “return to normalcy.” At the beginning of the decade, 1920, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street scandalously lampooned ‘normalcy’ and became a best-seller. Lewis should have copped the Pulitzer, but the Pulitzer’s literary committee was overruled by the excessively Pecksniffian Nicholas Murray Butler, the antisemite president of Columbia University, who besides thinking Main Street an open sewer of immoralities reacted badly to bobbed hair, short skirts, and the flappers who wore them. It was also the decade of the bizarre competition. Atlantic City staged its first Miss America contest. Flagpole sitting caught on, big time. And marathon dancing crossed the Atlantic (from England, it’s believed) to set superhuman records in America. So perhaps it wasn’t too surprising that, in the middle of all this, 1926 in fact, the idea of getting a woman to swim across the English Channel caught on so well as to gain sponsors (mainly newspapers) and attract a small crowd of hopefuls, including several American women encouraged by their successes at the 1920 and 1924 Olympic Games. Before that, the misogynists dominating the US Olympic Committee had disallowed female swimmers on grounds of decency (contestants had to remove their stockings in order to swim) and the damage competitive swimming might do to childbearing potential. The liberated woman who bested the Channel was Gertrude Eberle, a butcher’s daughter born in New York City on October 23, 1906. Her father was a prosperous butcher with a summer cottage in New Jersey, and it was there that Gertrude learned to swim. She set a world record in 1918 and added 27 more when, after the 1924 Olympics, she turned professional and went under contract (with the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune) to do the Channel. She first trained (1925) with a male swimmer who’d never made the crossing (and believed women couldn’t). But in August 1926 Eberle made it, in 14 hours and 34 minutes. By then, only five men had done it, and she beat the best of them by two hours!! New York City, where flappers abounded, gave Eberle a ticker-tape parade. Disney has lately acquired film rights to “do” her life, but Eberle faded into obscurity long before her death in 2003, a forgotten relic of an odd decade. ©.

[Stanley]

A woman's sport.

It’s just like a man trying to knit, isn’t it? Len Hutton on women’s cricket, as quoted in Fair Play (1976) by Netta Rheinburg and Rachel Heyhoe-Flint.

In St. Louis I have learned to keep silence concerning my cricketing exploits. Perhaps “exploit” (singular) would be more accurate; but I learned the game the hard way, as captain of the Principal’s Eleven in Grizedale College’s faculty v. student match, a casual affair that took place annually, early in summer term. One mark of its casualness was that women were often involved, and as players on the pitch. Otherwise, I was not aware that there was such a thing as women’s cricket. But there had been, and for a long time. One of its most illustrious figures was Netta Rheinberg, born in Brondesbury, North London, on October 24, 1911. Since she was a she, and her parents were Jewish immigrants, cricketing was not a likely career choice. But it wasn’t really her career, either, for she spent most of her early working life as a secretary, briefly at Stowe School (then a new establishment, now one of England’s elite “publics”) and then at her father’s textile business. Netta herself had been well-educated, then ‘finished’ in Europe, and had begun playing cricket at South Hampstead High School, still a leading private school for girls. She showed talent enough to keep at it. She joined the Gunnersbury Women’s Cricket Club in 1932, when the women’s game was taking off (there were 123 such clubs by 1938), and soon there was an English national side. ‘Women’s cricket,’ however, was still regarded as something of an oxymoron, and later in life Netta remembered the attitude of male sportswriters as always amused and occasionally outraged. Netta proved to be a capable player, at bat and in the field, but what made her essential were her managerial and secretarial skills, first at Gunnersbury and then for the national touring side in 1948-49—during which she played, coached, and managed. As her playing career wound down, she turned to writing about the game, including a book (Fair Play, 1976) co-authored with a younger woman of several sports, Rachel Heyhoe-Flint. I think I must have read about the book, for it made news, and I knew something about Heyhoe-Flint. But Netta Rheinberg and women’s cricket remained terra incognita for me. Nor was I aware of Rheinberg’s MBE. Her success at integrating the all-male Middlesex Cricket Club (when she was 88 years old!!) also passed me by. But now women’s cricket is a regular feature of a world-wide cricketing network. I subscribe to its streaming service and am now learning to like the women’s game. Were Netta Rheinberg still alive, she would say that my conversion was well past time. But she pulled up her stumps in 2006 and so, like me, keeps silence. ©.

[Stanley]

Poet, soldier, diplomat, courtier.

Whan myn housbonde is fro the world ygon, Som cristen man shal wedde me anon. From Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath.”

I first ran across Geoffrey Chaucer in a book taken down from one of my dad’s higher shelves, The Ribald Reader. There, in amongst snippets from the likes of Rabelais and Voltaire, was Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath,” one of his Canterbury Tales. Her enjoyment of her several husbands (and other passing swains?) smacked of the bawd rather than the erotic: but for a teen-aged reader she was interesting enough. In university, Chaucer became for me a chapter in the history of the English language, his ‘Middle English’ almost recognizable, especially when compared to impenetrable ‘Old English’ of Beowulf. I was also told that Chaucer rescued English (the language of the conquered Anglo-Saxons) from the Norman French of medieval England’s royal court. All this was partly true. But Geoffrey Chaucer was better known in his time as a scribe, diplomat, and courtier. That’s probably why we know the date of his death, October 25, 1400, while his birth date remains a matter of speculation, the best guess being sometime in the early 1340s. He wasn’t born humble. His father was an established London vintner. But despite his Norman French surname he was not of the gentry or the nobility, not a boy whose birth date would have been recorded. Indeed it was a leg up for young Geoffrey Chaucer when his father procured a place for him in the household of the Countess of Ulster, then the sister-in-law of King Edward III. A clever young man, with good handwriting and adept in Norman French and English, he made his way from noble house to noble house, served with mild distinction in the Hundred Year’s War, and with better luck as an ambassador royal during its diplomatic intervals. He found him a wife , Phillipa Pan, who was also a courtier on the ladies’ side, first for the Countess of Ulster and then for Edward III’s queen, another Phillipa. Chaucer’s poetry and tales (and much of it still survives) doubtless helped him to make his way in court circles, but at the time were icing on a quite different cake. There was, in this courtier’s life, ribaldry enough. Chaucer’s biographers have presented evidence that from time to time he may have played at being a Falstaff: once drunk and disorderly and at another time charged with rape. As for saving English, there’s a better case that Chaucer helped to make it respectable. He used English well, for one thing. Even better, Chaucer glossed the common tongue with the polish of continental writers like Boccaccio and Dante and the courtly love themes of French ballads. In amongst all that, the bawdy recollections of the “Wife of Bath” might be seen as poetry best kept on the top shelf. ©.

[Stanley]

The child actor as cultural trope.

Any man who hates dogs and small children can’t be all bad. Various.

That quotation is often misattributed to W. C. Fields, but in truth it was part of a toast to Fields, delivered by Leo Rosten at a dinner being given (for Fields) in 1939. It brought the house down, was headlined in Time magazine (February 27, 1939), and may be said to have launched Rosten’s successful career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. But it was not originally Rosten’s, either. Like any budding scriptwriter, Rosten had his ear out for good lines, and in the 1930s this line (or something very like it) was making the rounds in Hollywood. Tinseltown was then, and had been, awash with child actors, and while they might generate their own fan clubs and cause movie-goers to sigh or weep, they were not universally popular. P. G. Wodehouse, who had enough familiarity with Hollywood to make fun of its studio moguls and their retinues of “Nodders” and “Yes Men,” used child actors as comic foils in several stories and at least one novel. And in his toast Rosten referenced a scene in which Fields’s drunken and misanthropic character went after the child actor Baby LeRoy with an icepick. That never happened, either, but in the film (The Old-Fashioned Way, 1934) Fields did kick “Baby LeRoy’s” diapered end, and in rehearsals and on set had made it clear that he did not like impossibly cute kiddies, whether or not they showed dimples when they smiled on camera. The most famed of those idol-children was Shirley Temple. But they were legion, and one of the most famed (and most impossibly charming) of them was Jackie Coogan, born John Leslie Coogan on October 26, 1914. He was cute enough to become a hot property, and his parents landed him a film role (with Charlie Chaplin, no less) when Jackie was scarcely toilet-trained. By the time Jackie was 10, he’d got a named role in several films and was being marketed (in Hollywood’s usual way) in fan clubs and with an avalanche of Jackie-themed junk, including even peanut butter. There was also a famous charity drive, “The Children’s Crusade,” for which little Jackie was figurehead. The money rolled in, millions, but in a bizarre case (which broke in 1935, when little Jackie reached adulthood), it was discovered that most of it had been squandered by Jackie’s mother and stepfather. That produced the California Child Actors’ Bill, often known as the Coogan Act, which did protect child actors from exploitation, though perhaps not from ice picks. Coogan himself went on to happier roles, including the spooky Uncle Fester in TV’s The Addams Family. And there wasn’t a dimple in sight. And doubtless a host of child actors have been saved from penury, if not from satire, by the Coogan law. ©

[Stanley]

The mistress of manners?

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use. Emily Post.

A friend’s mother (she was, herself, a child of Des Moines’ upper crust) once told me that I was blessed by good manners and cursed by lousy etiquette—thus I presented a perfect contrast, she said, to her own son. That set me to wondering, so once I got home I consulted Emily Post’s Etiquette. I don’t remember which edition (by then there were a great many), but my parents’ copy (bound subtly in shades of blue and grey) gave me some comfort on the manners side, and I did know that Emily Post was a authority on etiquette. One might say that she was born to etiquette, in Baltimore, on October 27, 1872. Her father, Bruce Price, was then an up-and-coming architect, and he would soon move to New York to design homes, halls, and especially luxury “cottages” for America’s ‘real’ upper crust, in New York City: the same class that produced Edith Wharton, whose New York novels would puncture their pretentions. But Emily did her best to fit in. After being “finished” at one of the city’s exclusive girls’ schools and armed with all the ballroom and dinner table skills needed to get in the swim, she married Edwin Main Post, a banker. After a private ceremony in a mansion and a honeymoon in Europe, she settled down to an upper crust life. That included birthing two sons, Edwin Post, Jr. and Bruce Price Post. At about the time the boys were sent off to private school, Emily tired of her husband’s infra dig propensities for chorus girls, and began divorce proceedings. She also began to write, generally light, humorous pieces, not at all like Edith Wharton’s coruscating House of Mirth. That novel was published in the year of Emily’s divorce, 1905. With the Wall Street panic of 1906-1907 writing became a pressing necessity for the young divorcée. She wrote about what she knew best, fine arts, fabrics, and furniture for the better home or garden, but then in 1922 she hit her placer vein with Etiquette in Society, in Business, and at Home, soon a best seller and (probably) much the same in content as the edition I read in Des Moines, although by then the title had been shortened to Etiquette. She already had some money from her father and from her ex-husband, but Etiquette made her a rich woman in her own right. Spinoffs included a syndicated column (in 200+ newspapers), countless radio and then TV appearances, and (more lastingly) the Emily Post Institute, still run by Emily’s descendants (currently three great-great granddaughters and one great-great grandson). They all testify, I think, to America’s great faith in upwards social mobility and its belief that all one needs is a bit of spit and polish. As for me, I hope that good manners still matter. ©.

[Stanley]

Another wooly-minded scientist.

I don't want you . . . supposing that you can direct our research to what you deem useful ends when you can do no such thing. Richard Synge, speaking to Richard Crossman. Edinburgh, 1963.

When (in August 1994) the time came to write Richard Synge’s obituary, one essayist noted Synge’s legendary dismissal of politicians’ use of public money to direct scientific research. In opposition, in 1963, Britain’s Labour Party was promising to use the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ to revitalize the UK economy. So Labour hosted a conference to discuss how this might be done. Synge’s attendance was noted, and complimented, for he had, after all, won a Nobel in science (Chemistry, 1952). Instead of accepting the compliment, Synge warned politicians not “to meddle in affairs that [they] do not fully understand.” One might regard Synge’s response as ungracious (much of his own research had been publicly funded), but he had a point. Chances were, politicians would get it wrong. They look for votes. Scientists search for something else, and often not finding that ‘something’ can be the definition of success. Synge’s own distinguished career included a number of failures which he morphed into happy accidents. Richard Laurence Middleton Synge was born in Liverpool on October 28, 1914. His father was a successful stockbroker, and both parents descended from a long line of burgher notables: abolitionists, art collectors, botanists, and educators. The boy Synge was expected to follow along these paths, but his mother thought him so absent-minded that he had to be taken to school. He was, she hoped, thinking always of other things, and she was probably right. At Winchester School, one of England’s elite “publics,” the ‘other things’ became science, and he had to stay another year to mind the gaps left by a schooling which, up to then, had been centered on Classics. Synge took his new enthusiasm to Cambridge University and a Double First (1936), but still without focus on a single discipline. Various political enthusiasms (including the Communist Party) intervened, but an interest in the chemical constituents of wool emerged, and that in turn took Synge to thinking about all sorts of proteins and, more to the point, how to see each one of them and to differentiate between them. This required him to study old laboratory techniques and to invent new ones. Indeed it’s said that his 1952 Nobel was the first awarded for discoveries in methodology rather than, strictly speaking, chemistry. So when Dick Synge stood up in Edinburgh to warn Dick Crossman against trespassing, or meddling, or political poaching, he knew whereof he spoke. But it’s worth noting that both of them were Old Boys of Winchester School. Science can move quickly, politics too: but this apparent coincidence reminds us that some things never change. ©.

[Stanley]

A father of The Pill.

We know exactly how to develop the male pill, but there's not a single pharmaceutical company that will touch it. Carl Djerassi, 2014.

It’s often observed that the birth control pill, aka “The Pill,” had many fathers but few mothers. But , gender aside, thee men were about as diverse a group as modern science could produce, including the Camus-like hero John Rock (1890-1984), the devoutly Roman Catholic obstetrician whose care for his patients and distress at their unwanted pregnancies led him to be one of the first to prescribe ‘The Pill’ (through trials in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, 1954-1956). And the originating US patent (#2,744,122, 1956) is often called the “Miramontes Patent” after The Pill’s first synthesizer Luis Miramontes—then an undergraduate at Mexico’s Universidad Nacional. But if you asked the ‘real’ father to stand up, he would be Carl Djerassi, born in Vienna, Austria, on October 29, 1923. In 1951 he was Luis Miramontes’ lab supervisor and inspiration, and had already done a great deal of work with hormones, animal and human, including proofs of the very close chemical relationships between certain “male” and “female” hormones. Such chemistries had great potential, for humans have been trying to stop having babies for about as long as they have been having babies, and these hormones promised a safer and surer way than earlier methods like lead-mercury cocktails and, believe it or not, weasels’ testicles. Djerassi was fully aware of this potential, and had gone to Mexico to explore it in an atmosphere freer than was available in the USA (he’d fled Naziism to arrive in the USA, penniless, in 1939). Djerassi’s career involved far more, in breadth and depth, than playing hormonal tricks with women’s menstrual cycles. True, he profited greatly from his work on The Pill, but didn’t stop there. The discovery took him first to Wayne State, then to Stanford, and more importantly to executive positions with the science firm Syntex. In all three places Djerassi became one of the most published of American scientists, in many fields. He also pioneered new research methods. Not content with all that, Djerassi was a prolific writer, whose works (three autobiographies, a clutch of novels, some poetry, and dramas for stage and film) often turned on interplay between science and literature. He called four of his novels “science in fiction”, distinguishing them from mere “science fiction.” That’s an interesting thought, and I plan to follow it up by reading a couple of Carl Djerassi’s books—or the play Oxygen (2001), which he coauthored with the Chemistry Nobelist Roald Hoffmann—and after that, Hoffmann himself, for he’s now Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell. ©

[Stanley]

Her grandfather's granddaughter.

Major fathers as a rule breed minor sons, so our little London peacocks had better tone down their fine feathers. News story in the London Daily Express, 1932.

This is said to have been written in reference to Randolph Churchill (1911-1968), only son of Winston and Clementine. Probably so, but later the Daily Express hired Randolph, in hopes of obtaining his inside dope on the doings of other ‘London peacocks.’ After a first marriage to Pamela Digby (later called “the 20th Century’s most influential courtesan”), Randolph wed an eccentric Australian. Their marriage produced much scandalous news but also a daughter, Arabella Spencer Churchill, born in London on October 30, 1949. Bella, as she became known to her friends and to the press, was to prove as eccentric as her father, but managed a life of purpose and consistency—a major granddaughter, one might say, to her favorite grandpapa, the ‘major’ wartime prime minister. First she had to negotiate her childhood: a difficulty as both her parents were often in the headlines for their erratically unhinged behavior. But her mother did see to her education and ‘finishing,’ and Arabella entered upon adulthood (and her debutante year) with some good publicity. Her brief romance (in 1970) with the Swedish Crown Prince brought the usual gush in the press, but then she was already carving out a different place for herself. Later, Arabella said that she had “wanted to be a hippy.” She had some success at that, but she’s better remembered as a patron of worthy charities, supporter of Lost Causes (notably the Biafran rebellion in Nigeria), and above all as the moving spirit of the Glastonbury Festival. In this she partnered with a Glastonbury farmer, Michael Eavis, whose “Worthy Farm” (so it was called) would become the focal point of the annual fair and festival. Eavis would later write Arabella’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, a quite respectable reference work, and indeed their partnership persisted through almost four decades, from the first “Glastonbury Fayre” in 1970 to Arabella’s death in December 2007. Their relationship was only occasionally stormy, perhaps because they never married. Instead, Arabella married, first, a schoolteacher, and then secondly a professional juggler. Her first marriage was as short as her father’s with Pamela Digby. The second lasted, centered around Worthy Farm and its annual festival of folk, and rock, and (oddly?) children’s parties. Arabella also served as president of a worldwide fund for child welfare and as a volunteer National Trust docent at her grandfather’s favorite house, Chartwell. When you next attend the Glastonbury Festival, you will cross the Whiterock River via Bella’s Bridge, built as her memorial by Michael Eavis who, I think, still owns Worthy Farm. ©

[Tripps]

Major fathers as a rule breed minor sons,

Champion racehorse Frankel's current stud fee which this year is £275,000, says that some think otherwise.

[Stanley]

Houses and their settings.

I dedicated myself to architecture. It comes first. I come last. Lutah Maria Riggs.

Soon after the American conquest of 1846, Santa Barbara acquired a reputation as the hideout of crooks like the transplanted Irishman Jack Powers (who came as a common soldier with General Frémont but graduated to burglary on a grand scale). But the city’s Mediterranean coastal climate won out. Road and rail connections made it a plausible resort for Los Angeles’ wealthier entrepreneurs (and a gold mine for realtors), and it developed a strong local economy, including a fling with film (you could always shoot outside in Santa Barbara). There was a boom in offshore oil production, although in the 1950s and 1960s this was soiled by ecological disasters. Since then there’s been a self-consciously “green” theme to the city’s economic development, but steadily, from just before 1900, it has been private wealth that has made the city’s reputation, populated its pleasanter neighborhoods, and developed exclusive suburbs (not to mention ranches) in its hinterlands. Ron and Nancy Reagan were fairly typical, and I think Oprah Winfrey still calls it home. That made the city an architect’s dreamland, and the home of what is still called the “Santa Barbara Style.” One of its most successful practitioners was Lutah Maria Riggs. She was born in the very un-Mediterranean environs of Toledo, Ohio, on October 31, 1896, but after her physician father’s early death Lutah and her mother transplanted to California’s Riviera, where Lutah was schooled in draughtsmanship. She was good at it, and went north to Berkeley to achieve a BA in Architecture in 1920. Back in Santa Barbara she was hired by the ‘Spanish colonial’ architect George Washington Smith. Smith and his wife virtually adopted Lutah Riggs, took her on European holidays, and in the firm Smith promoted her to chief draughtswoman. As architect in her own right, Lutah Riggs conformed first to the Santa Barbara Style (tiled roofs, arched doorways, whitewashed exteriors), but she moved towards an individualized style in which her landscape architecture created “natural” settings for very modern homes, some modest in size but undeniably expensive in construction. Most famous of them was the large Ludington house and estate. Most arresting was the Erdman house, built around an open courtyard and pool. When it finally came on the open market in 1960, it made the cover of Vogue. Most charming was her Vedanta temple in the city’s botanical garden. In Santa Barbara today, a Lutah Riggs Society keeps her memory alive, offers occasional tours, exhibits, and excellent pictures of her work. ©.

[Stanley]

The green-eyed monster.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
---from Othello, [almost certainly] by William Shakespeare.

My great-grandfather Daniel Kerr believed that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. His favorite candidate was Francis Bacon. We know this from a couple of Daniel’s letters and two small alabaster busts—one of Bacon, the other of Shakespeare—that he kept in a glass fronted bookcase. The letters are now lost, the busts shattered, and the bookcase burnt. As for me, I’ve got over the problem of how Shakespeare made himself a genius. Among the works that mark Will as an extraordinarily learned playwright was The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, first performed (probably at the old Whitehall palace) on November 1, 1604. It’s also, by the way, a remarkable piece of theatre, a tragic tale about how our ancient vices (principally ambition, pride, and jealousy) can destroy love. That’s signaled by the heroine’s name Desdemona, from the Italian for “ill-fated.” Indeed she was, but her name also identifies Shakespeare’s immediate plot source, a fiction by the Italian Giovanni Giraldi, the 37th story in Gli Hecatommithi, a bound collection of 100 novellas. It’s one of ten stories themed on marital infidelity. Of course Shakespeare couldn’t leave a good story alone, and so he wrote it away from Desdemona’s infidelity to be about male failings, principally those of Iago and the Moor himself, Othello. That was genius, but scholars have not been willing to leave it there, so they have identified many sources for Othello. These range from ancient classics (Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Pliny’s Natural History) through Geoffrey Chaucer, and include a clutch of contemporary works including several tall travelers’ tales about the Levant and even 16th-century ‘scholarship’ on African geography. There was also the well-known story of the Ottoman Empire’s siege and sack of Cyprus. Othello changes that around, too, but still one can see how various myths arose about this odd Shakespeare. How could it be that a not-too-well educated glover’s son from a town known mainly for its sheep knew all this stuff? There have been many candidates for the post of the “real” Shakespeare. It could have been one of Shakespeare’s fellow actor-writers. Instead modern social snobbery has insisted that the ‘real’ playwright and poet have been someone better- educated and better-situated in the Great Chain of Being. I’m no expert, but my advice to such people is, “get over it.” Genius need not have a particular social home. To begin your cure, read Stephen Greenblatt’s engrossing Will In the World (2004). As its subtitle suggests, it will tell you How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. ©.

[Stanley]

An ambiguous text.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, November 2, 1917.

The modern state of Israel has many origins, including some vague biblical prophecies and the rise of Zionism. This latter was by no means a majority movement among European Jews, and within its ranks “Zionism” was split into secular and religious wings. In terms of international diplomacy, the idea took shape with the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917. It is so named because it surfaced in a brief letter from Arthur James Balfour, British foreign secretary, to Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild. Very brief: in very few words, Balfour promised Britain’s “best endeavours” to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in what was then (and had been for 400 years) an Ottoman province which, in 1917, had in it 25,000 Jews. There were also, of course, a few thousand Christians, and many more thousands of Muslims, and all had reasons (each to their own) to see the territory as a “Holy Land.” Balfour acknowledged these ‘others,’ hoping “nothing shall be done which may prejudice [their] civil and religious rights.” That in itself has made the ‘Balfour Declaration’ a disputed document, and the British government “apologized” in 2017 for not being more definite about Balfour’s empty piety. But in 1917 there had been deeper ambiguity about the Declaration and the Cabinet’s decision to issue it. Britain was at war. What we now call World War I (1914-1918) found the Ottomans allied with Germany and Austria and against Britain, France, Russia, and—very recently—the USA. It was, in part, an imperial civil war. The British and the French were always scheming to disrupt Ottoman rule, and in another Whitehall office efforts were underway to entice local Arabs to rebel against the Turks. Promises were thus being made to a variety of local princes, or emirs, for political and territorial rewards if they would throw off the Ottoman yoke. Meanwhile, in still other British government quarters, and in Paris, plans were being made for an “imperial” disposition of all Middle Eastern real estate, plans which would issue at Versailles, in 1919, as the British and French “mandates” for this or that patch of these Holy Lands. Added to the mix was the racist temper of the British political elite, maybe not Balfour and certainly not Henry Simon (the Colonial Minister and a secular Jew), but among those ministers and backbenchers who hoped that Lord Rothschild might convince “international Jewry” to help finance the Allies. So it is not beyond reason to see the Balfour Declaration itself as an expression of western, Christian, Antisemitism. In the modern history of Palestine, ironies abound and tragedies lurk. ©.

[Stanley]

See the USA in your Chevrolet.

I’m as American as the Chevrolet. Whoopi Goldberg.

In its early years, the American automobile industry was a macédoine or, better, an ad hoc stew made up of whatever leftovers could be found in the larder. Alternatively, some view it as a family affair, and it is true that many of the players knew each other, but it was a family in which lasting loves were in short supply. There were shotgun weddings, unwanted or abandoned children, and many divorces, acrimonious Detroit partings in which common stock alimonies changed hands faster than in Hollywood. And surprisingly few of the players knew anything much about the internal combustion engine. Taking the early entrepreneurs together, they were bicycle makers and wagon builders and stock-jobbers before they had anything to do with horseless carriages; gear differentials and clutches (for instance) were mysteries—so several early companies used belt drives to move their axles. But there were survivors, and among them was the Chevrolet company, which opened for business (manufacture and marketing) on November 3, 1911. Formal incorporation, or if you prefer consummation, took place five days later. Somewhat unusually, two of its original partners knew quite a bit about motor cars. They were the eponymous brothers Louis-Joseph and Arthur Chevrolet, Swiss immigrants who’d begun (in Europe) as watchmakers, bicycle racers and wine-pump makers, but who migrated into the USA and into motor-car making in about 1900. Sportsmen-mechanics both, they became automobile racers in a time when drivers really had to do a lot of tinkering under the hood, so we might say that they learned their new trade from the bottom up, working first for a French automaker in Brooklyn and then moving to Detroit in partnership with David Buick, a Scots immigrant who began working life as a plumber but who found carburetors more exciting than vitreous enamels. Now enter William Durant, a stockbroker who didn’t like motorcars at all but saw their sales potential, and the Chevrolet was born. Durant had already founded General Motors with the brilliant marketing idea of selling cars of varied quality and price in different market sectors. Ousted from GM, he began again with Chevrolet and would return to GM, making the ‘chevy’ the cheapest marque in the lineup and, indeed, a world-wide brand. Chevy sold so well that Durant was able to buy back into GM, displacing the Chevrolet brothers but keeping their brand name, which was selling too well to scrap. Later, Louis and Arthur (and their kid brother Gaston) went into airplanes (and airplane racing, of course), but that’s another story, albeit one with a similar plot line. ©

[Stanley]

Hindsight is, far too often, 20/20 vision.

Sometimes I want to say to people, just look at my work. Dr. Patricia Bath.

In Manhattan’s Lower West, there is a large school building which now hosts six separate high schools, including a tech, a humanities prep, and a business school. Another is named after James Baldwin and calls itself a “transfer school.” It’s also a palimpsest of modern American history. It began as a ‘textile school,’ sensibly near New York’s ‘garment district’. But it acquired wider academic ambitions, symbolized by Irving Adler, a gifted mathematics teacher (he was an inventor of the “new math”) and an influential writer on all aspects of k-12 education. The school also acquired important WPA murals on historical and social themes. And its faculty was, according to the Senate Internal Security Committee, shot through with commies. So Adler (one of the Reds) was fired, its “leftist” murals were plastered over, and the school was renamed after Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. But it remained a magnet for ambitious parents and bright kids. Among its alums were actor David Carradine (1936-2009), Bronx borough president Herman Badillo (1929-2014), prize-winning historian of slavery David Brion Davis (1927-2019), and the singer-composer Jose Feliciano (b. 1945). That last is interesting, because Feliciano was born blind, and it’s possible that his blindness was noticed by another student, Patricia Bath. She was born on November 4, 1942, the child of ambitious parents who thought attendance at Charles Evans Hughes might be a good start for their kids, even though Patricia and her brother had to commute all the way down from Harlem. Patricia proved a whiz at high school mathematics and won a National Science Foundation scholarship for her accomplishments when she was but a Junior. That award enabled her to jump start her research career. She did well enough (published research on cancer) to win a story in the New York Times and admission to Hunter College. Then she went to Howard University for her MD (1968). Already a crusader for social justice, Patricia became an innovative ophthalmic surgeon, a compiler of several professional “Firsts” for African-American women , and a pioneer in ‘community medicine.’ Her five patents include one for laser-based cataract surgery and another for ultrasound eye surgery. Dr. Bath took her campaign for community medicine world-wide, working for underserved communities in (inter alia), Kenya, Tanzania, France—and in Washington D.C. In all this, Patricia Bath said that her “best moment” was to use a corneal transplant to restore the sight of a North African woman who had been blind for 30 years. Those WPA murals have also been restored to sight, by the way, although that took 50 years. ©

[Stanley]

Ozymandias in the flesh.

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Named after one of the world’s more successful prophets, “The Great Belzoni” became his own publicist, and did so well that he is credited with three, perhaps four, careers—good going for a life that spanned only 45 years. Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in Padua on November 5, 1778, one of fourteen children of a barber, and later he did do some barbering, but first his parents tithed him to the church. His training for the priesthood (or for a monastic life) was ended by the French invasion of Rome, and in 1798 his wanderings began, at first hawking religious relics to the credulous, then cutting hair in the Netherlands. In 1802 he turned up in London a giant of a man, 6’7” in height and strong as an ox, to take up a theatrical career and an actress wife, Sarah Banne. Soon his strength and ego turned him into “The Great Belzoni”, a circus strongman with a reputation for spectacle. He and Sarah toured on that, in Britain and on the continent, and in 1815 were headed to Istanbul to entertain the Ottomans when an agent of the Pasha of Egypt, understanding Belzoni to be an expert in hydrology and earth moving, encouraged them to detour to Luxor. There began Giovanni’s career as a pioneer Egyptologist. He was by no means a professional archaeologist, but he was or became good enough at digging and sluicing to engage the interest of the British consul. There also began Sarah’s contact with local women, which she would report on in her own publications and in postscripts to Giovanni’s multivolume editions on ancient Egyptian curiosities. Perhaps most of Giovanni’s discoveries made their way to London and contributed to the 19th-century vogue for the exotic. The head of Ramses II, a huge granite bust now in the British Museum, is said to have inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, although the poet concentrated mainly on the missing “vast and trunkless legs of stone.” Poetic license, in order to comment on passing glories. From these triumphs (still resented as archaeological piracy in Egypt), Giovanni and Sarah turned to Levantine and North African travel, adventurous in itself in those days, and exploration, even more dangerous. Then, thinking there might be more glory in geography than in artifacts, Giovanni Belzoni left Sarah in the relative safety of Morocco and set out to find the source of the Niger. His life and luck ran out in Benin, once the center of another great empire, and he was buried there in 1823. Sarah lived long after, selling or exhibiting Giovanni’s remaining artifacts, but from 1851 she received a small pension from Victoria, the equally remarkable queen-empress of a modern, shorter-lived, empire. ©