BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Word pictures in natural history

I have unscrupulously practised the plain matter-of-fact candour and "individuality" which we ourselves like to find in the narratives of other dwellers in new countries.    From the Preface of My Home in Tasmania (London, 1852), by Louisa Anne Meredith.   

Ever since Charles Darwin set foot in the Galapagos, islands have provided interesting evidence for those who would study the isolation of a population, and then its distinctive evolution as a new species.   Likewise, an island can be a laboratory for extinction, as newly-introduced populations wreak havoc (through disease, predation, or simply competition for resources) on existing island varieties.   The fate of the “Tasmanian Tiger,” or Thylacine, is well known, the last survivor having died in a zoo in 1936.   Previously it had been hounded out of Australia (an ‘island continent’) and survived only in Tasmania, a large island off Australia’s southeastern coast.  Already threatened by aboriginal peoples and their dogs (‘dingoes’), the thylacines could not survive invasion by Europeans, their enclosed farmsteads, and their domestic animals.   Today, most of Tasmania’s natural history is read in the island’s bones and fossils, but there was an early European chronicler of Tasmanian flora and fauna, and her books provide more than a glimpse of what Tasmanian nature was like in the early years of European settlement.   She was Louisa Anne Meredith, née Twamley, born in the outskirts of Birmingham, England, on July 20, 1812.   By all accounts, she was already quite a character before 1839, when she married her cousin George Meredith and shipped out with him to what was still called Van Diemen’s Land, where George had been part of the early development of a civilian (as opposed to a transported criminal) population base.   In Birmingham, Louisa was already a published poet and a radical essayist.   In Tasmania, she kept up those activities but added to them her writings on Tasmanian flora and fauna.   Some, notably Tasmanian Friends and Foes: Feathered, Furred, and Finned (1880) were aimed at children, but all were enriched by her observations and, better, brought to life by her illustrations.   There’s also some evidence that Louisa Anne Meredith was a pioneer nature photographer who used her pictures as models for her sketches and watercolors.    So while George was busy as a legislator, magistrate, and civil servant (he was not very successful in any of these activities) Louisa Anne became very well known for her publications.  Her novels and poems sold reasonably well, and her natural histories were well enough done to win her honorary membership in Australia’s colonial version of the Royal Society.   She even got a state pension from New South Wales, on the mainland, where she lived out her declining years after decades of perceptive writing in, and about, Van Diemen’s Land.   ©.

[Stanley]

The origin of the 'black' newspaper.

Journal Politique, Progressiste et Commerciale.   Masthead declaration of the New Orleans Tribune, ca. 1864-1868.
  
The first edition of the New Orleans Tribune hit the streets on July 21, 1864.   Originally a tri-weekly, it would become the US’s first daily newspaper published by African-Americans and, as it proclaimed, for the whole black community.   Whether the city’s black community was “whole” was, however, still a question.   Under Union army occupation since early 1862, the city included a great mass of the formerly enslaved and a well-established créole elite, mainly free.   These ‘colored’ aristocrats were marked out by their lighter skin shades and by their multicultural social identity.   Appropriately, then, the paper was a bilingual operation, appearing also as Le tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans.   It was owned by the brothers Louis Charles (1823-1890) and Jean Baptiste Roudinez (1815-1895).   Their parents were refugees (white father, ‘colored’ mother) from the Saint Domingue (Haiti) revolution.  The brothers were raised as young men of privilege.  Well educated at home and by private tutors, Louis had degrees from Paris and Dartmouth College and had returned home to practice medicine.   With the Union occupation, they eagerly came forward to play a leading role, but where would their loyalties really lie?   As the paper made clear in its very first number, they self-identified as black, claiming rights of full citizenship for the whole community, not just the literate, bilingual elite, but the ‘black’ community in all its skin shades.   The Tribune campaigned not only against slavery (in those territories still held by the Confederacy) but against the “Black Codes” then being proposed, and partially enacted, by occupying Union forces and their civilian allies in the name of maintaining civil peace and racial order.   The Tribune’s courage—for such it was—arose from many sources, not least the whole history of New Orleans’s creole community and its often humiliating role of serving the all-white, pure white, plantocracy.   Louis Charles Roudinez had already made clear his ‘racial’ loyalties in the way he’d conducted his medical practice in pre-war New Orleans.   He was also a child of Europe’s romantic revolution, a partaker in France’s abortive 1848 uprising.   He hired as one of the Tribune’s journalists a veteran of Belgium’s failed revolution.   Geographically, the Tribune was located in the secure center of New Orleans creole society, in Conti Street.   The old building still survives in what we call the “French” Quarter;  but the paper’s radical positions on equal rights and equal access offended both northern ‘carpetbaggers’ and ‘native’ white southerners.   After losing its government contracts, the Tribune died.   But it had showed the need for an independent black press in the land of the white free and the home of the white brave.   ©

[Stanley]

A woman's ascent.

I saw no reason why women should be incapable of leading a good climb.   They had, in fact, already done so.  But why not make it a regular thing?   Miriam Underhill, 1934. 
  
The Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) is hardly an ‘exclusive’ society. It has a low annual fee ($75), and the Boston chapter alone has over 20,000 members.   Nor is it a redoubt of that disappearing phenomenon, lamented by some of our Senators, the “dominant male.”  (Although it is true that this year both the AMC chair and its presidency are held by women.)   But at its beginning (1876) the AMC was 100% male.  Not only that, but its founder and first president was the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919),  No friend of women’s lib he, whose Harvard Observatory hired women only as “computers” (so-called) and who himself took credit for several of his computers’ most important discoveries.   But as far as the AMC went, all that would change during Pickering’s lifetime, thanks to the alpine exploits of Miriam O’Brien Underhill, born on July 22, 1898.   Despite her Irish maiden name and Maryland birthplace, Miriam had Boston Brahmin blood running in her veins, and did later marry a Harvard professor, Robert Underhill.   But she met him in the Alps, and he was also an enthusiastic climber.   They climbed together for several years before they married.   Once back in Boston, besides birthing and raising two sons, Miriam turned her attention to New Hampshire’s White Mountains.   Already a member of the AMC (she’d joined when she was a Bryn Mawr student majoring in Physics), she was a co-founder of one of the AMC’s “bushwhacking” sub-incorporations, the 4,000 Footer Club, restricted to those who could certify that they’d climbed all 48  of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot plus peaks beginning with Mt. Tecumseh, at 4003 feet, and climbing upwards to the 6,288 summit of Mt. Washington.   She then went on to found a more exclusive subdivision, restricted to those who climbed all 48 between December 21 and March 21 in a given winter.   But Miriam’s mountaineering is best known for her “women only” climbs, all-female ascents of some of the world’s most challenging pinnacles.   This activity was at first frowned upon by what had been, if you’ll excuse the expression, a male thing.   After Miriam’s first all-female ascent of the Aiguille du Grépon, one deprived mountaineer struck the route off his list.  “Now. . . no self-respecting man can undertake it.”  Sounds pathetically familiar.  But in her long and varied alpinist career, Miriam was happy to climb with men, her husband and others, as opportunity provided.   If you want to join the AMC’s “winter 4000” set, all you have to do is climb them all, then pay an additional $10.  Your gender doesn’t matter.   As the old saying has it, the more exclusive the club, the lower the fee.  © 

[Tripps]

I saved this picture a while ago. No idea why - or who it shows and and where it was taken, but it fits this theme.
The caption is the rather insulting "strange place for a washing line"

strange place for a washing line.jpg

[PanBiker]

Looking at the fashion I would say that is an early female climber, I agree that the washing line quote is an insult but probably par for the course for females at the time. A pioneer for advancement of the sport/discipline.

[Tripps]

PS I googled lady climbers and found this Female climbers so perhaps we now know who, and where, and when. The dates of birth and the climb look a bit dodgy though.

Why? however will forever remain a mystery to me.

[Stanley]

I'd already noted the long skirts and street shoes David. Amazing!

[PanBiker]

In a similar vein and while we are on the subject. "Vibram" rubber compound used extensively now on walking and rough terrain footwear was invented by an Italian bloke who became tired of going to the funerals of his climbing mates who used to fall of mountains regularly as the only footwear available at the time for rugged terrain in the Alps were hob nailed boots!

[Stanley]

The patron saint of British organic farming

The whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead.  Favorite saying of Dinah Eiluned Lyon Williams.

Dinah Williams (née Jones) was born a farmer, at Aberystwyth in Wales, on July 23, 1911.   Her father, Abel Jones, was professor of agriculture at the local university, and he backed up his academic expertise by small-hold farming.   Her mother Bessie, from a tenant farmer family, was an instructor in dairying, also at Aberystwyth, after qualifying with advanced study in Scotland and England.   So Dinah learned from experts how to farm.   And from practical experience, too: she was regularly milking their cows from age 5, winning dairy prizes at age 12, and pretty much running the dairy operation after her father’s early death.   Her faith in the family farm as a nurturing institution was strengthened by her beliefs about nutrition, health, and sustainable farming.   One farmed with and within nature, and one sowed, cultivated, harvested, and sold with the objective of producing health-sustaining foods.   These convictions strengthened with the passing years and were put into practice after she married an Aberystwyth student and moved with him to a farm they called Brynllys.   That’s ‘heather’ in Welsh, and Brynllys was indeed a hilly tract on which hedgerow heather faithfully bloomed every year; but the farm also looked out to sea.    This suited her husband who had wanted to be a merchant seaman, but health issues kept him ashore, at Brynllys.   There he and their four children became parts of an ongoing experiment in organic farming and healthy eating.    Not only did they contain within themselves a whole cycle of organic production and consumption, but they became successful marketeers.    Already opposed to chemical fertilizers and wedded to the idea of ‘natural’ foods, Dinah Williams became an active and adept founder-member of Britain’s Soil Association, Lady Eve Balfour’s brainchild which is now a registered charity and a major landowner trust as well as the recognized certifying authority for Britain’s organic farming industry.     Brynllys itself went fully organic in 1973.  And Dinah’s elder daughter Rachel still runs the place.   And you don’t need to travel all the way to Aberystwyth to sample her “Rachel’s Organic” yoghurt.   As for Dinah Williams, I can’t certify whether or not she ever ate white bread.   Probably not very much of it.   Her active life as a family farmer did not end until she died, at Brynllys, in 2009, having just celebrated her 98thbirthday.   She was survived by all four of her children and, we might say, by her prize Guernseys.  ©.  

[Stanley]

The Hungarian who remade English cuisine.

On the Continent, people have good food; in England they have good table manners.   George Mikes, 1946.

So George Mikes concluded in his 1946 satire, How to Be an Alien.  It’s still worth reading.   In that same year, Mikes, a Hungarian refugee from 1930s fascism, became a naturalized British citizen (then known, with British perversity, as a “subject”).  In the very same year, 1946, another Hungarian was preparing his own escape to Britain, this time from Russian communism.   Almost on arrival in London, this new alien came to similar conclusions about Anglo-cookery.   But while George Mikes went on to chide the English about almost everything (“Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot water bottles”) this one developed a cookery obsession.   His name was Egon Miklos Ronay, born in Budapest on July 24, 1915, into a family of established restauranteurs.   His father was then one of the city’s top tax payers.    With the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, there was some retrenchment, but young Egon was raised in great comfort and learned some of the arts of comforting others, including their palates.    Luckily for him, his branch of the family was also in the process of assimilation, distancing themselves from their Jewish past.   That, and some judicious bribery, saved them from the worst that Hungary’s fascists, and then Hitler’s legions, could do, but when the Soviets arrived in 1945 Egon concluded that flight was his best option.   He arrived in London to be bemused, offended, and occasionally horrified by the local eateries’ mistreatment of foodstuffs (and of diners).   So Ronay borrowed money—quite a bit of it—to set up his own restaurant right next to Harrod’s department store.   His good food had the good fortune to be sampled by one of London’s few restaurant critics, Fanny Cradocke, who loved Egon’s stuff and his style, and helped him along into a new, or rather parallel, career as a writer and speaker on the whole business of commercial cookery.   His first Egon Ronay’s Guide to British Eateries appeared in 1957, and by the time we arrived in Oxford it was recommended to us as the best way to avoid indigestion while eating out in England.   It took us a while to become Ronay-dependent, but we did.  With some interruptions, his Guide was published in many editions, and if we left the Guide at home we looked for a Ronay “rosette” before entering this or that café or inn or pub.   Ronay and his army of ‘volunteer’ critics (they were paid, and they traveled in pairs) kept assiduously at the task of educating the public about all levels of British catering, even motorway stops.   Egon Ronay kept at his task until he died in 2010, of years, replete with honors, and (one assumes) stuffed to his Hungarian gills with good British food well-prepared and nicely presented.   ©  

[Stanley]

The more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.    Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements(1951)

Early America was full to bursting with homespun philosophers, self-educated and self-made.  How many of them there actually were is another question, but there were enough to provide us with a ‘founding father’ (Ben Franklin), an heroic president (Abe Lincoln), and ‘the Lincoln of our literature’ (Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain).   The modern USA has been less productive of the type.   Studs Terkel (1912-2008) donned the mantel in several of his books, notably Division Street (1967) and Working (1974), but Studs had two degrees from the University of Chicago and couldn’t claim (convincingly) to have been educated solely by the school of hard knocks.   At about the time that Studs was hitting his stride, however, there burst upon the scene a new book by a new thinker, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951).   Hoffer was every inch a self-made, self-educated thinker, a longshoreman in San Francisco’s notorious dockland, and the book made him an instant hero, especially coming (as it did) right after the mass hysterias of German Naziism and Russian Communism.   My dad was a Hoffer enthusiast, as were many college professors.   Leading liberal publications, notably Harper’s and The Atlantic, gave Hoffer writing room, and he became a sort of adjunct faculty member at California’s flagship campus, Berkeley.   More books followed, as did his life story.   If we are to believe Eric Hoffer, he was born in the Bronx on July 25, 1902, the son of German-speaking immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine, his father a skilled craftsman.   He suffered the traumatic losses of his mother, then his dad, fell prey to blindness and then, inexplicably, regained his sight—and with it an insatiable appetite for the printed word.   With little more than that, he hit the road, rode the rails (unticketed), camped with hobos, took jobs where he could find them, and—always—kept reading.   When he could afford lodging, he rented near a library (any library), and devoured what he could of its contents.   Later skeptics have doubted some elements of Hoffer’s origin story, but the vagabond worker-reader part rings true, and Hoffer is still worth reading.   His philosophy is expressed largely in aphorisms, rather than systematically, and its appeal is demotic.   In that sense, it’s rather like Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard,” spinning off home truths that are (too?) easily digested.   So although Hoffer began his public career as a darling of the liberal left (for instance Eric Sevareid and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) he eventually received the Medal of Freedom from the  very homespun Ronald Reagan, who liked his longshoremen to be maverick-ish.   ©. 

[Stanley]

The blessings of (genteel) poverty.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.   From the novel Immaturity, by George Bernard Shaw.

Immaturity was written in 1879, at the start of a creative burst that produced five novels and innumerable essays.   No publisher would touch the novels (Immaturity wasn’t published until 1930).  His essays didn’t do much better, and so George Bernard Shaw continued to live—as he had since his birth in Dublin on July 26, 1856—in ‘genteel poverty.’   Shaw did not invent the phrase (or the state), but genteel poverty was an influential skeleton in his closet, and from the 1890s he would indeed make it dance.   It was the perspective that gave us a series of stage plays marked by mordant humor, sharp comment, ironic inversions, and unexpected outcomes.   When viewed as museum pieces most can be called “comedies,” but in their own times and contexts they provoked as much discomfort as laughter.   In between his failed fictions and his stage successes, Shaw trained up as a journeyman writer.  As a theater critic, he was bowled over by Ibsen’s dramatic realism.   As a political essayist, Shaw was appalled by the needless (and imposed) suffering of Britain’s poor.   We can measure his isolation from Victorian gentility by seeing him as a socialist, as a converted (therefore zealous) vegetarian.   And although he embraced Darwinian evolution, he could not see his social equals (Anglo-Saxon imperialists) as the fittest of all survivors, far less as God’s last word.   Instead, Shaw hoped for a future improvement (perhaps in a couple of thousand years) of the whole species.   We can see all these ideas in most of his great successes.   Man and Superman (1905) exposed Jack Tanner’s masculinity as more comic than toxic in the face of Ann Whitefield’s “life force.”   And why not?  For since Arms and the Man (1894) had already made comedy of military heroics, what had ‘man’ to do?   Another kind of army, the Salvation Army, was ironically exposed in Major Barbara (1905).    And medicine and prostitution were shown to be subject to similar professional ‘standards’ in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902).    Today George Bernard Shaw is best known for Pygmalion (1913), where an eminent linguist sculpts a Cockney flower girl into an aristocratic lady, then finds her to be an actual human being.   A film version of Pygmalion won Shaw a Hollywood Oscar in 1938, and was further translated into a superb musical comedy (My Fair Lady, 1956).   What Shaw might have made of Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews we cannot know, for the incorrigible old man, long since rich, no longer genteel, yet still a socialist campaigner of gentle persistence, had breathed his last in 1950.   My guess is that he would have been amused but discomfited.   ©.

[Stanley]

Poverty and politics (and race and gender) in the American south.

She wasn’t no housekeeper.   Bless her heart.   Myrtle Lawrence as remembered by her daughter-in-law Irene Lawrence Witcher, 1990.

But almost everyone in her family remembers Myrtle Lawrence as a “real lady.”   That role wasn’t easy for an Arkansas sharecropper’s wife, with her work in the cotton fields and her 14 children.   Myrtle Lawrence was born a poor white in the center of Alabama’s ‘black belt’ on July 27, 1893.   That was an interesting time to be ‘poor white trash’ in the southland, for it saw the high water mark of the Farmers’ Alliance, a group so determined, and so radical, that in several states the ‘black’ and ‘white’ Alliances merged to present a united front against the depredations of the cotton economy and of their grasping landlords.   It is not known whether Myrtle’s birth family joined their local Alliance.   We do know that she married at 13 (the same age as her husband, Ben Lawrence), and that their sharecropping took them across the border into Mississippi and then across the great river into Arkansas.   Along the way, Myrtle birthed and reared her kids and became a demon cotton picker, an absolute wonder in her fieldwork mode.   By the time the Great Depression rolled around, Myrtle and Ben had had enough.   And when local landlords froze on to the Agriculture Adjustment Act’s crop subsidies, freezing out their sharecroppers black and white, “enough” became way too much.   So Myrtle and Ben joined the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (SFTU).   Both were active, but Myrtle discovered personal talents that vaulted her into the SFTU’s Arkansas leadership.  She was articulate, even eloquent, about the debt trap.   She was as funny as the proverbial crutch.   Dressed in her mended homespun, unable to read or write, she confronted landlords, spoke at rallies, buzzed right in to state offices to argue with politicians and bureaucrats.  Soon she developed a national reputation.   She even appeared on stage, in New York City, at a 1937 rally with Senator Bob LaFollette (Republican), Mayor Robert Wagner (Democrat), and the perpetual Norman Thomas (socialist).   There she stole the show with her offhand comments, her salty humor, and her spit bucket (she had the snuff habit, bad).   So Myrtle was not the “poor white” that northern liberals wanted.   She was too rough, too common.   She couldn’t stop using the ‘N’ word although she had forged black-white alliances in Arkansas and had become a favorite speaker at racially integrated STFU rallies.   After all, for her whole life she’d lived integrated with the rural poor, white andblack.   But she was hustled off that New York stage and into obscurity.   You won’t even find her in Wikipedia.   But she existed, and her vision forward, now rediscovered by feminist historians, suggests that we have much to learn about the democratic potential of poor women like Myrtle Lawrence.  ©.    

[Stanley]

The moral worth of skilled work well done.

My basic assumption when talking about agriculture is that there's more to it than just agriculture.    Wendell Berry, 1977.   

All being well, Wendell Berry will turn 90 early next month.   He’s an accomplished poet, novelist, and essayist, a political and environmental activist, and a family man.   He and Tanya Berry (herself an artist and writer) have celebrated their 67thanniversary.   But their constant ‘day job’ has been farming, in the same Kentucky county where Berry’s ancestors settled six generations ago.   In 67 years they’ve built up their original 14 acre smallholding into a medium-sized farm which neither of them would call an agribusiness, because it has been a way of life.   So it seems appropriate to wish Berry a (premature) happy birthday by recalling an earlier farmer-poet, John Kaye.   He was born sometime before 1530 at Woodhouse, near Huddersfield, in Yorkshire’s West Riding, and died there on July 28, 1594, a long life by 16th-century standards.   Early in that life, aged about 16, he married Dorothy (also 16), and together they parented 16 children, 14 of whom survived them, another signal achievement for that day and age.   Meanwhile, John and Dorothy Kaye looked after their farm and farmstead, expanding both to meet their expanding needs.   They added rooms and glazed windows to their farmhouse and new acres to their lands.   And they improved the land, too, or improved on it.   They drained wetlands, marled soils to make them less acidic, made their timber into a marketable crop, and when they found a coal seam close to the surface they improved on that, too.    That Kaye coalmine is out of harmony with Berry’s environmentalism, but for the Kayes it was another example of the land’s bounty, which they were bound in faith to improve.   And we know all this about John Kaye for he was literate.   He ‘kept book’ on all his activities, integrating all into a whole life.   He recorded sales and purchases and, in amongst all that farming activity he reflected on how best to fertilize his children’s lives.    And he and Dorothy did well by their offspring, good marriages for all of them and properties for their sons, two of whom went on to Cambridge degrees and Lincolnshire pulpits.   And in amongst all this recording of the facts of his life, John Kaye wrote poetry.   Indeed it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the poetry from the bookkeeping.    There is even a poem about Dorothy’s “howswyverie”: “to order well my familye/to see they lyve not Idyllye/to bring upe children veertuslye/to releeve Poore folkes willinglye.”   That poem is labeled as Dorothy’s.   Scholars insist that John wrote it “in her voice.”   But altogether it testifies to the moral worth that John Kaye found in his daily exercise of his skills as a farmer of the land.   For him, as much later for Wendell Berry, there was more to agriculture than agriculture.   ©

[Stanley]

One of the "Madonnas of Pervyse".

This life of mine has been a bungled affair.   Only in time of war have I found any real sense of purpose and happiness.    Elizabeth, Baroness de T’Serclaes, in her Flanders and Other Fields (1964). 
   
The Baroness de T’Serclaes became a war hero, or war heroine, when she was known as plain Elsie Knocker, a divorcée who, with Scotswoman Mairi Chisholm (1896-1981), became known as “The Madonnas of Pervyse” when they ran a ambulance service at the eastern end of the frontlines in World War I.   That was the Belgian end, and Mairi and Elsie were there because the British authorities did not approve of women on the battlefield.   The Belgians, more desperate and perhaps less sexist, were not so discerning.   But soon there was another issue.  At the front from the earliest stages of the war (they arrived in Belgium on September 26, 1914) the ‘Madonnas’ were quickly convinced of the life-saving value of battlefield first aid, stanching the flow of blood, cleansing and dressing the wounds, offering emotional support amidst the maelstrom of battle.  As we would say today, Elsie and Mairi treated battlefield shock even while they dressed torn bodies.   And it worked.   Their wounded had a better survival rate than any others along that front.  Their insistence on immediate frontline care brought them into conflict with their volunteer unit, the “Flying Ambulance Column” and its commander Dr. Hector Munro.  So Elsie and Mairi left Munro’s base at Panne to set up their own HQ in a ruined “Cellar House” at Pervyse, closer to the front.   That made Elsie a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold and won her a new husband, the Baron Harold de T’Serclaes, a pilot in the fledgling Belgian air corps.    Elsie was a striking figure anyway, quite tall and wearing a veil (as, I guess, angels do) along with a long overcoat, boots, and breeches, a dramatic ensemble designed by its wearer.   Elsie Knocker was born Elizabeth Shapter, a doctor’s daughter, in Exeter, Devonshire, on July 29, 1884.   Orphaned early, she was parented by wealthy relatives, educated privately and ‘finished’ in Switzerland.   In 1905 she married an accountant named Knocker and went out with him to serve the empire.   She bore him a son, but the marriage fizzled.  Elsie returned home to train as a nurse-midwife and join the motorcycling fraternity aboard her Chater Lea motorbike.   There, adventurous and a little flamboyant, she met Mairi Chisholm, and in August 1914 the ladies (Elsie already 30 but Mairi only 18) joined up with the Flying Ambulance Column.   After the war, widowed, Elsie retired into genteel obscurity, from which she burst with the 1964 publication of her memoirs and then, in 1977, a special exhibition at the Imperial War Museum which featured both “Madonnas,” Elsie and Mairi.   It is there, today, that you can find Elsie’s private papers and her collection of war memorabilia.   ©.  

[Stanley]

The wild moors above Haworth parsonage.

And am I wrong to worship where
Faith cannot doubt nor Hope despair,
Since my own soul can grant my prayer?
Speak, God of Visions, plead for me
And tell why I have chosen thee!     --From “Plead for Me,” by Emily Brontë.  
 
The Brontë parsonage sits between civil society (the village of Haworth, below) and wildness (the bleak moorland above).   We visited it on a rainy, dark day, which seemed to fit the mood of the place.   From their bedrooms, the ‘surviving’ Brontë children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, could look down on the village’s slated roofs and cobbled streets, but perhaps they looked more often at the nearby parish graveyard (with most bodies interred above the hard ground) or up to the bracken-covered hills.   They’d all been born lower down, at Thornton, but moved upland when their father had been named ‘perpetual curate’ to Haworth parish.   Soon after (1821) their mother died, then their elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth (both in 1825).   None of the four survivors lived much longer (Charlotte, the eldest, would live only until 1855), but together they created an imaginative universe that is with us still, notably in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (both novels published in 1847 under the names of Currer Bell and Ellis Bell).   “Currer” and “Ellis” had already published a book of poetry, to which Anne Brontë (as “Acton Bell”) also contributed.  Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is now considered to be the masterwork of all this literary flowering.   Like her siblings, she was born downstream, in Thornton: her birthdate was July 30, 1818.   So she was but three years old when her mother died.   Along with the other children, she was reared by her father and her maiden aunt Elizabeth Branwell.  By all reports it was not a gloomy household, but a loving one and, for the time, open and imaginative.   Books and periodicals abounded, poems read and listened to, stories told and heard, and the girls were sent out to schools (Emily went to a small school for distressed clergymen’s daughters at nearby Cowan Bridge), then tried their hands at teaching school.   But they all found the parsonage a safer, more secure place, and all would return there to live and to write.   For Emily especially the high, dark moorlands provided her best artistic setting, and the title Wuthering Heights conveys that idea poetically, all by itself.  So too does the hero, or anti-hero, Heathcliff, the orphan child taken in by the Earnshaw family.   Heathcliff falls hopelessly in love with his 'stepsister' Catherine.   She loves him but will not marry one of such lowly origins.   Their tragedy and Heathcliff’s revenge is played out against the bleak moorlands of Wuthering Heights, now said to be Top Withins, the ‘fell’ (hillside) that climbs up from the Haworth parsonage.   A ruined farmhouse on Top Withins can still be seen from Emily’s window.   Perhaps it was, indeed, the Earnshaws’ accursed home place.  ©    

[Stanley]

An unusual Victorian father.

Newson Garrett, Victorian curiosity. 
  
Victorian England was the cockpit of the western world’s industrial revolution and the center of its greatest empire.  Thus it produced great wealth, and a capitalist class sure enough of itself as to embrace Darwinism, but in a distorted form.   Many became ‘social’ Darwinians, convinced (by Herbert Spencer) that they were the fittest species of all, naturally selected to sit at the top of their world.   But there was great poverty, too.   Burgeoning wealth at the top produced, at the bottom, an oppressed working class; and this dialectic led some (e.g. the German immigrants Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx) to hatch a different evolutionary theory which held (and hoped) that a new ‘communist’ revolution would—inevitably—settle society on a radically equal plane.   But what made Victorian England really strange was yet another social strain.   We might call it middle-class radicalism, and it could be very radical.   But many of its leading exemplars were too well-established, too wealthy even, to be called ‘middle’ anything.   These ‘anniversary notes’ have featured some of these people.   Often they were highly educated (schoolmasters, Oxbridge dons).   Sometimes they were wealthy manufacturers (of soaps and chocolates!!) or bankers.   And among them were pioneer women, founders of colleges, artists, and of course suffragettes, who aimed to upset Victorian applecarts by making political animals of women.  Among the leading suffragettes were Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson  (who was also England’s first female doctor and—even before she could vote—its first lady mayor).   But the point of this note is that Millicent and Elizabeth were sisters, and their father was one of those Victorian entrepreneurs who became an upper middle-class radical.   He was Newson Garrett, born in Suffolk before Britain became “Victorian” on July 31, 1812.   “Newson” was his mother’s maiden name, but he was indeed a ‘new son’ of a younger son, so did not inherit his grandfather’s engineering business.   But he got a privileged start, and after spinning his wheels as a classy pawnbroker moved into milling and shipping.  But he became wealthy as a brewer and maltster, a leading insurer, and was also an increasingly ‘radical’ member of the Liberal Party, the reforming mayor (and leading citizen) of Aldeburgh.   His “Maltings”, would one day become famous as the site of the annual Aldeburgh Music Festival.   He’s quite a puzzle, this founding father who broke with his birth family to raise a whole brood of upper-middle-class Victorian radical children and Edwardian radical grandchildren.   I don’t think that these Garretts can be explained by either Herbert Spencer or Karl Marx.    ©.   

[Stanley]

At Roedean, the girls called her 'Dempy'

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collectio ... sutton-hoo  The URL for the Sutton Hoo Treasures at the British Museum. 
   
In December 1942 Edith May Pretty, widow, died suddenly at the Royal Hospital, Richmond, London.  Her ashes were buried next to Frank Pretty, her husband, at All Saints graveyard at Sutton in Suffolk.   There might be little else to say about her, other than that she was unusually rich and that it was on her estate that the “Sutton Hoo Treasures” had been unearthed in 1938-1939.   She had then donated them “to the Nation.”   They now have their own room in the British Museum.   They are magnificent, and would be quite enough to make Edith Pretty a figure of interest.    In 1940, the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (who had a “thing” about Anglo-Saxons) took time off his war work to offer Ms. Pretty the honor of Dame Commander of the British Empire.   She turned it down, another point of interest about her.   Indeed Edith Pretty, widow and JP, was quite a character.    Edith Pretty was born Edith Dempster on August 1, 1883, the second daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Dempster, he an engineer’s son and she a mill worker’s daughter.   In the year of Edith’s birth, Robert broke with his father’s business and set up for himself in Manchester.   He was successful enough to take a lease on a large Cheshire estate and have his daughters educated at Roedean School.   Edith was a gregarious sort, known as “Dempy” at Roedean, and among her friends was Mildred Pretty, the daughter of a Suffolk corset manufacturer.   After schooling, Edith polished in Paris, traveled the world (e.g. the Taj Mahal in India and the Mormon Tabernacle in Utah), and got interested in the excavations her father sponsored at home (the leased estate was at Vale Royal, the site of a medieval abbey).   Frank Pretty proposed to her in 1901, and then annually until they married in 1926.   Meanwhile there was a war and her aging parents, with Edith involved on both fronts as battlefield nurse and parental caregiver.   Edith also began her career as a philanthropist and magistrate, and almost accepted a nomination to stand for parliament (as a Tory, of course).   Finally Frank (47) and Edith (42) married, in some style for they’d both inherited fortunes, and they used her money to buy an estate at Sutton Hoo, a base from which they continued their good works and their lives bountiful.   They had a son in 1930 (Edith was 47!!); then Frank died, painfully, in 1934.  After that, Edith continued her charities, got curiouser about the barrows at Sutton Hoo, and recruited a very odd bird called Basil Brown to start digging.  The story has  been retold in a 2007 novel and a 2021 film, both entitled The Dig, both with poetic license.  That’s OK, for Edith Pretty’s story is as interesting as the Sutton Hoo Treasures are beautiful.   ©

[Stanley]

"Women in the News"

Once upon a time, Women in the News was an occasional column in the New York Times.  
       
From 1955 to 1971, the New York Times ran a ‘women’s page’: “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings.”   It wasn’t the paper’s first concession to its female readership.   A ‘housekeepers’ column’ had appeared in the 1870s.   But the “four Fs” page (as its women writers irreverently called it) was a new departure.   Oddly, it also provided a place where the Times could safely segregate its female staffers—on the ninth floor.   The whole business of keeping women in their place (in the building, and in the paper) had begun to unravel in 1956, when Betsy Wade became the paper’s first female copy editor (and the only woman at its main news desk), and in 1974 was ripped asunder by Wade’s leading a class action suit over equal pay for equal work.   But before that sexual segregations ruled, symbolized by an occasional column called “Women in the News.”   It was not by-lined, of course, and it may have been a guerilla activity of the 4F girls.   But in 1961 it reported the appointment of Mina Spiegel Rees as the founding dean of the graduate school at the new City University of New York.   The column did keep to the proprieties by noting that Dr. Rees was a blonde, hazel-eyed, and a demon in the kitchen, but this “woman in the news” was a giant in mathematics and thus an unusual cook.  Mina Rees was born in Cleveland on August 2, 1901.   The family soon moved to New York, where Mina came up through the city’s public schools and then attended its public women’s college, Hunter College, where she graduated summa, in mathematics.   Finding that Columbia, the city’s premier private university, “was not interested” in providing her with graduate study, she read law for a bit, then migrated to Chicago where her PhD supervisor, Leonard Dickson, was already famous for encouraging women to be mathematicians.   She then went back to Hunter’s high school division before joining the College’s faculty.   There followed a spell (1943-1951) when Dr. Rees became chief mathematician for the US Navy (where young subalterns called her “Sir”), before she returned to Hunter as Dean of the Faculty.   So she was a “woman in the news” before the Times  thought so, and so she continued, becoming in 1969 the founding president of CUNY’s graduate college and then the first-ever woman president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.   Rees also turned the very neat trick of making the New York Public Library into (also) the official library of CUNY’s graduate college.   Today, with a woman running for president and a (male) vice-presidential candidate babbling about “cat ladies” a special column on ‘women in the news’ would be the very definition of “otiose.”   Mina Rees’s story almost makes one believe in progress.   © 

[Stanley]

Social justice for those who become old.

Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes.   Maggie Kuhn.

Before the age of the catchy acronym, there was the National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women (the NAUOLCW).  In its heyday, it was indeed national (there were two branches even in St. Louis, one—inevitably?—called the Eliot Branch), but its core strength was in New England, where scores of branches met in their local churches: Unitarian, Congregational, (northern) Baptist.   But when Maggie Kuhn joined the NAUOLCW staff in 1947, it was moribund.   I have no doubt that she livened the place up, for Maggie was born to agitate.   Indeed she was born in Buffalo, NY, on August 3, 1906, because her mother, Minnie, refused to raise her children in racially segregated Memphis, where her father headed the Dun & Bradstreet office.   Maggie grew up in Ohio, majored in English in the (then) women’s division of Case Western Reserve University, and embarked on a career of social activism, first with the YWCA.   She began as a social gospel Christian, but transitioned to a more radical ‘social justice’ stance as she moved from Cleveland to Philadelphia and then to the YWCA’s HQ in New York.  Where female people lacked rights they should secure them.   Women had a right to vote.   Working women had a right to unionize.   Married women had the right to choose when to have sex, and their enjoyment of it would be enhanced by using birth control.   But as WWII threatened to involve the USA Maggie went beyond feminism and turned to pacifism.   Then, when America joined the war effort, Maggie became program director for the YWCA-USO.   The war had happened, after all, and the warriors had rights, too.   After the war, she joined, then quickly left, the NAUOCLW and spent 22 years raising hell within the Presbyterian Church, first in its Education division and then Christian Missions.  In 1970 the church told Maggie that she would have to retire at 65, which was when she became really famous as a founder-member of The Consultation of Older and Younger Adults for Social Change, or COYASC.   That’s too clunky for words, and with Maggie Kuhn at the helm it became better-known as the “Gray Panthers,” a name shamelessly purloined from the Black Panthers and, radically, including a youth division.   Everybody gets old, so everybody had an interest in creating social space within which the elderly could—should—live active, engaged lives.   So Maggie did, forming her own mixed-age commune at her Philadelphia home, which she called the Shared Housing Resource Center (SHRC).   There, still acronym-free, she agitated to the end of her life, which came in 1995.  © 

[Stanley]

From the Joy Club of White Plains to the STL Village.

If this planet is going to survive, I think women are going to have to take over.    Gloria Gordon, in a 2015 interview.

Gloria Gordon was born on August 4, 1923, in White Plains, NY, where her father ran an auto repair shop.   All being well, she will celebrate her 101st birthday today, in St. Louis.   Last year, at 100, August 4 was “Gloria Gordon Day” in the city, where one of her signal accomplishments was to be the cofounder of ‘STL Village,’ an ongoing experiment in community living for the elderly (and their younger neighbors).   She has tallied up many other accomplishments, none of which should be characterized as a Gloria Gordon “takeover.”   She’s been a team player all her life, beginning with a street gang of kids in White Plains, where her father owned and ran an automobile repair shop.   In that, he was continuing his father’s work, for Gloria’s grandpa, a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, had run a stable for his town’s horses.   When the 1920s turned into the 1930s, repairing cars turned out to be good business (since few could afford new cars), and Gloria, who’d done well in high school as a team player (on the school’s newspaper and her class yearbook), went off to distant Oberlin College, where she majored in psychology and minored in various group activities like supporting car workers’ strikes, working with black youths in urban Cleveland, and becoming an enthusiastic New Dealer.  She led a team that in the 1944 campaign organized a huge rally for FDR, filling Carnegie Hall to overflowing, then (after meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt) returned to Oberlin for a Masters degree.    Gloria’s next experiment in teamwork was with her new husband, Barry Commoner, a biologist with a populist streak who taught at Washington University in St. Louis.   She had two kids, and intended to be a stay-at-home mom, but teamwork beckoned and she (as lead psychologist) joined with Commoner to produce the famous children’s tooth survey.  My generation had absorbed too much Strontium 90 into its dentures.   Their findings gave a needed boost to President Kennedy’s Test Ban Treaty negotiations.   But after 30 years of marriage, Gloria decided that her husband was not enough of a team player.   They divorced, amicably it is said, and Ms. Gordon struck off on her own, armed now with a psychology PhD.   But by temperament and conviction, she was not a loner, nor a takeover artist: not enough testosterone, she suggested in her 2015 interview.   After a brief experiment in a communal cooperative she read about the “village” movement for elderly folk and brought the idea to St. Louis.   I hope Gloria’s OK today.   She’s helped to make her neighborhood much friendlier and more livable for old folk like me and Paulette.   Since we live there, too, we wish her well.  © 

[Stanley]

Holding power to account.

Machiavel says, Calumny is pernicious, but accusation beneficial, to a state; and he shews instances where states have suffered or perished for not having, or for neglecting, the power to accuse great men who were criminals, or thought to be so.    “Reflections on Libelling,” New York Weekly Journal, February 25, 1733. 
  
The New York Weekly Journal was only the second regularly-published newspaper in the city, and it was founded to be an opposition paper by a group who felt that William Bradford’s Gazette was only a lick-spittle client of the colony’s royal governor.   The above quotation, from one of the Weekly Journal’s first numbers, shows its intention.   Its main target would be Governor William Cosby, newly appointed as New York’s embodiment of the royal prerogative, and thus (legally speaking) above complaint.  “The king can do no wrong.”   Perhaps that was why the men behind the Weekly Journal decided to put their trust (and their money) into Peter Zenger (1697-1746), who had been Bradford’s apprentice but who (as a German immigrant) might be less respectful of English law.  Whoever wrote “Reflections on Libelling” (it was signed by “Cato”), Zenger understood his mission.   And his target, Cosby, was one of colonial New York’s most venal, greedy, and grifting governors (a signal achievement, given the competition).   Soon Governor Cosby ordered a copy of the Journal to be burnt by the common hangman and threw Zenger in jail, where he languished for months while Cosby’s Attorney General tried to get a New York Grand Jury to indict the editor for seditious libel.   The Grand Jury proved resistant, and so did New York’s chief justice Lewis Morris, so the governor removed Morris and proceeded anyway.   The case became a cause célèbre up and down the seaboard, and Zenger’s friends hired the archetypal “Philadelphia Lawyer,” one Andrew Hamilton, to lead the defense.   And so it was that on August 5, 1734, a jury of Peter Zenger’s peers found him innocent.   What he had written about Cosby was, the jury said, true, and therefore could be neither libelous nor seditious.   The jurymen defied both the governor and the presiding judge, no small matter in an early modern law court, and we should be celebrating them as much as we celebrate Zenger and his counsel.  Scholars have since demonstrated that the Zenger case was not ‘precedent’ in the legal sense, but it was foundational, celebrated by many of our Founding Fathers as a symbolic statement that the sovereign power (king or president), could do wrong, and that a free press was one way to hold power accountable.  It is an interesting question whether the US Supreme Court’s recent decision on “presidential immunity” (Trump v. US) will remove “truth” as a defense against presidential accusations of subversion.   When truth itself is in short supply, one wonders.   ©.  
 

[Stanley]

She stood bail for Rosa Parks.

I think the Lord has given men the power to decide and be free and they seem to me to be making a pretty bad mess of it.   Virginia Durr, in a letter to a friend, 1965.

When Rosa Parks disturbed the peace of Montgomery, Alabama, by sitting in the wrong seat on a bus and then, worse, refusing to give it up, she was arrested, fingerprinted, her “mug” photographed.   When she refused to give $10 surety for turning up to her trial, she was jailed, and her price went up.   Bail was set at $100.   That sum was met by E. D. Nixon and by Clifford and Virginia Durr.   Nixon was no surprise, for he was head of the local NAACP, but it seemed odd to many that the Durrs were involved, a respectable white couple living in a proper part of the city.   Perhaps it was because they’d occasionally hired Rosa as seamstress.   But it was no surprise, nor was theirs a chance acquaintance with a seamstress.   The Durrs, both born in Birmingham, were as southern as one could get.   Clifford had a host of leading Confederates in his family tree, and Virginia was descended from a founder of the Ku Klux Klan.   But I guess you could say that they’d become corrupted, Clifford by his time as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford then as a bright legal eagle in the New Deal administration.   Virginia’s fall from grace was more complicated.   Virginia Durr was born Virginia Foster, in Birmingham, on August 6, 1903.  Her father, a Presbyterian minister, was aware of the ‘race problem’ but preached racial harmony rather than racial justice.   In his ‘South,’ everyone knew their place, and in the Foster household people of color served as nannies and maids.  Virginia was brought up to be a southern (white) lady, and much of her education was a polishing process.   Then she went North, to Wellesley College, where her racial façade began to crumble.    After marriage (in 1923), the crumbling went on first in Washington, DC, and then back home in Birmingham where both Durrs combated segregation and were active, too, in attacking the root causes of southern poverty.   On both fronts they roused suspicion, and Virginia had the honor of being grilled by the Senate’s Internal Security  Committee.   She happily gave her name and age, but refused to answer any questions about her previous affiliations with communists, socialists, and other outside agitators.   Instead, she spent a lot of time powdering her nose and being a perfect lady—which, of course, she knew how to do.   In Birmingham, meanwhile, she was further corrupted by her associations with a young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife Coretta—and, of course, with Rosa Parks.   Rosa was much more than a seamstress and Virginia much more than a southern white lady.   Both would prove that, abundantly, as they sought to undo the messes we’d made of our powers to decide.   When Virginia died, aged 96, Rosa Parks remembered her perfectly.   “She was a lady and a scholar, and I will miss her.”   ©. 

[Stanley]

The woman who wanted to be.

I just had this general goal. I want to do and I want to be and I want to help. And I’ve been able to do it.    Ada Deer, 2018.

One student I remember from my time as a GTA at Wisconsin-Madison was a Native American, a Menominee.   After his second “A” paper in the course, I took him aside to ask him what his ambitions were.   It was a junior-senior level course, and I hoped he might go on to a PhD.   But his aim was for a law degree, after which he’d go back home—to Menominee County, to help his tribe regain its sovereign status.  After all, the tribe was funding his scholarship.    I remembered that student when, last year, I read Ada Deer’s obituary in the New York Times.    She’d graduated from Wisconsin in 1957, and in 1975, when the Menominee Restoration Act was signed into law, Ada Deer became the Menominee’s first female tribal chair.   I’d like to think that my student—as a young lawyer—played a part in that.   But Ada Deer is my topic today, for she was born on August 7, 1935, in Kenesha, WI.   She grew up on tribal land, in a log cabin without electricity or running water, but with the unusual presence of a ‘foreign’ mother, Constance, a product of Philadelphia’s upper classes who’d gone to Menominee to do good, married a tribal man, and then focused her own ambitions on their daughters, including Connie.   So while Joe Deer worked in a local lumber mill and drank too much, Ada Deer did well in school, became active in Girls State, learned to ride saddled horses, and even won a beauty contest for Native American girls, run by Columbia Pictures as publicity for The Battle of Rogue River (1954).  But Hollywood didn’t turn her head.   After her time as tribal chair, she became active in politics (the first Native American woman to win a primary election), and although she never won a general election she became well enough known in Democratic Party counsels to be named Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs by the incoming Clinton Administration.   There she revolutionized the architecture of her office, removing her big desk and substituting a round ‘council’ table.   Likewise, she ran the Bureau as an advocacy, not as a loyal Clinton appointee, and (rather like the unlucky “Chief Mike” in The Battle of Rogue River) became unloved by several major players within and without the administration.   When the Bureau was eviscerated by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” (a contract which, she felt, really amounted to “genocide” for Native Americans) Ada jumped ship and returned to her day job as lecturer in Native American Studies at the University, and lived in Madison until her death in 2023.   There she continued to inspire students, became one of the university’s most noted alumnae, and saw her godson Ben Wikler rise to become the chair of the state’s resurgent Democratic Party.  So Ada Deer’s spirit lives on, in a ‘battleground’ state.  © 

[Stanley]

Henson, Peary, and the 'race' to the North Pole.

I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.   Matthew Henson, quoted in his 1955 obituary in the New York Times.  
 
As terra incognita shrank, the polar regions became the focus for men seeking new horizons and new knowledge but also thirsting for fame.   European expeditions tended to travel light (none lighter than the tragic Scott dash for the South Pole).   Not so the 1909 American North Pole expedition of Commander Robert Peary and his “first man,” Matthew Henson.   They’d been before, and had lived and traveled with the Inuit (indeed both had fathered Inuit children).   So they reckoned that it was the locals who knew best how to deal with the locality.   In 1909 they set off with 50 Inuit (men, women, and children) and 246 Inuit sled dogs.   The expedition needed many workers, many sleds and many dogs because they also took about 100 tons of whale and walrus meat and blubber and tons of other supplies—including, of course, coal.   Their aim was to lay for themselves a safe route to the Pole.  Peary, the expedition’s commander, was ten years older than Henson and (if not exactly a child of privilege) had graduated from Bowdoin College where he’d rowed on the college’s crew and joined its most exclusive fraternity.    Matthew Henson, born in Maryland on August 8, 1866, as a sharecroppers’ son, would live just long enough to see the modern civil rights movement and a changing racial consciousness that would eventually make him the more interesting of the duo, the one who’d been born poor and black and then went to sea at 12.   Henson’s parents were not former slaves but part of Maryland’s large population of ‘freed people of color’.   Henson himself was very light-skinned but like so many Americans he did not suddenly “discover” he was “black.”   He was identified as black by law; and it was an identity he never rejected.   Orphaned at an early age, Henson was sent to the racially segregated city of Washington, DC, where an uncle saw to his early education, in black primary schools.   Aged 12, Henson left school and took up the post of cabin boy on the three-master Katie Hines.   I find it difficult to imagine an unkinder fate, but in Henson’s case he was virtually adopted by his ship’s captain.   So young Henson continued his education in reading, writing, and figuring, and expanded it by learning how to navigate.   That last turned out to be a crucial skill, for at age 23 Henson was engaged by Peary for a US Navy survey which aimed to find a suitable route for a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.   So well did Henson and Perry mesh that they became virtual partners in several arctic explorations, culminating in their 1909 expedition. They returned to a hero’s welcome, but the preferred hero was the white one.  Henson did write a memoir and was respected in the black community, but worked for decades in the obscurity of customs offices.   In his old age, however, as his nation fought a war against racism and then confronted its own past, Henson became more heroic.   He was honored by the war office, by congress, and then by presidents (Truman and Eisenhower).    In 1988, 33 years after his death, Henson and his wife Lucy were reinterred at Arlington, quite close to the Peary monument.   So once again the intrepid explorers found each other.   In the 1909 polar expedition, as they came close to their goal of 900 North, they did get separated for a time.   In his memoir of 1912, Henson audaciously claimed he had been the first to set foot at the pole.   Peary disputed this.  Yet it now seems certain that, despite all those tons of blubber, their long of partnership, and their close relationships with the Inuit, both Peary and Henson had missed the “real” North Pole by miles.   But let’s just call it a tie.   ©