BOB'S BITS

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By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Jane Jacobs.

A random trek through large sections of St. Louis (or nearly any other major city) can be a depressing experience. From the human devastations of slum neighborhoods to the awful ugliness of strip malls to the deafening noises of heavy traffic . . . a feeling of disaster can overwhelm. Once upon a time, the solution was to destroy in order to save, the clear-cut the slums, to eliminate traffic gridlock by slicing the city with superhighways, to build completely anew. That we are much less likely to think this way owes in part to experience (it hasn’t worked) but also to creative thinkers like Jane Jacobs, born Jane Butzner to a prosperous doctor’s family in Scranton, PA, on May 4, 1916. Scranton was already in decline and would be devastated by the Depression, and this doubtless helped shape Jane’s ideas, but she was a she, and much she-life intervened before she found her métier, which was to urge us to see cities whole, to take them as they are—places where a lot of people live and work—and build from there. Educated in General Studies at Barnard (saved from a structured degree, she later reflected, by her bad high school grades), and with a bit of practical experience making her Greenwich Village home into a nice place, Jane vaulted into prominence in the 1950s with a couple of anti-freeway campaigns, some devastating reports on “urban renewal”, and a Harvard speech. A Rockefeller grant in 1958 gave her the time to complete her magnum opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). It’s still worthy of your attention, but only if you’re interested in living in livable places.©

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Dit is on ernst. Motto inscribed in the Afrikaans Language Monument in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Early on, Nelson Mandela understood that he would have to make friends of his enemies. The (white) minority in South Africa was too conscious of its own “colonial” past to contemplate giving up its power to (black) majority rule. And so Mandela learned Afrikaans, the Africanized Dutch of the core white population. The Afrikaners descended from the Dutch settlers of the 17th century, originally sent to Africa to provide a provisioning base for the Dutch East India Company’s trading fleets. By 1800, their Dutch had become distinctive enough to be the butt of metropolitan jokes, and (aka Afrikaans) it is now considered a language in its own right. Its borrowings (from Bantu, Portuguese, and Khoisan) and accents are part of its identity, but it also has evolved its own grammar. When (1806-1814) the British Empire absorbed “Dutch” South Africa, it ignored this heritage by making Dutch, rather than Afrikaans, the second official language (after English) of the colony. The long Afrikaner struggle for recognition and independence (e.g. the Boer Wars) was thus part of Mandela’s challenge, and it’s symbolized by the Afrikaans Language Monument that still stands in the Western Cape with its motto “DIT IS ONS ERNST” (‘we are in earnest”). The monument remembers May 5, 1925, the date the British finally conceded official status to Afrikaans. Just as Mandela learned to love rugby, the sport of the Afrikaners, he learned to speak their tongue, and both lessons helped him to consummate his own struggle for independence. Afrikaans, still the most widely spoken first language in the new Republic, is also still one of its official languages. ©

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If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of popular government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror, Robespierre, February 1794.

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Thus spake Ben Franklin, a genial, brilliant scientist-journalist in July 1776. He was trying to get the Continental Congress to agree on essentials and stop wrangling about commas, but he also knew an essential truth about revolutions. They are risky. Our revolution was underway, and although it’s often portrayed as a genteel affair, it produced the largest number of political exiles of any modern revolution. Its moderation (if it existed at all) is a legend grown up because soon Americans could contrast it with the French Revolution, a bloodier affair. The man who helped make it so, Maximilien Robespierre, was born in the Pas-de-Calais on May 6, 1758, into a solidly bourgeois family (lawyering and brewing) and educated, in a solidly bourgeois way, to revere virtue in politics (Cato, Cicero, etcetera). Such reverence, carried to extremes, is dangerous for as we all should know one man’s virtue is another’s poison. Thrown into serious, risky politics by the earthquakes of 1789 and after, Robespierre found himself a leader of the Jacobins, “the Incorruptible,” and with enough power to impose one vision of virtue on all other visions. Ironically, one of his visions of virtue involved compromise at home and peace abroad, not to mention the abolition of the death penalty. But in the maelstrom of Revolution, he became known—some historians say unfairly—as chief architect of The Terror, the master of the guillotine. And when his virtue fell to another version, he became the Terror’s victim, executed without trial on July 28, 1794. ©

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A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. David Hume.

In Scotland, surnames are of notoriously irregular pronunciation, e.g. the one that utters as “fanshaw.” I won’t even try to spell it. But Scotland, however bonny, is a small country, which may be why young David Home (born May 7, 1711, in Edinburgh) changed himself into David Hume, for he seemed to be embarked on a career in a diplomatic corps dominated by Englishmen, and he wanted his name to look like it sounded, However, while a student, he had experienced an intellectual awakening so exciting that he kept returning to philosophical speculation and writing. Indeed, given his impact on western thought, one can scarcely imagine David Hume submitting himself very long to the niceties of diplomacy or the rituals of military service. He also could have left himself as David Home, for apart from brief diplomatic service in Paris, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, he circulated around Scotland, preferring the “plain roughness” of Edinburgh’s Poker Club to the “lusciousness” of Paris. Hume was certainly a common sense fellow, which shows in the radical empiricism of his philosophy, in his Political Discourses (1751) and in his classic six-volume History of England (1754-1762). These works made him a famous and sought-after “public intellectual” despite his deep skepticism about religion. His skepticism was shared by his friend Adam Smith, who fondly remembered Hume’s hope that Charon, the ferryman of Hades, would allow Hume a few more years’ life to see “the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” This was not to be. Hume did live long enough, however, to influence several leading American revolutionaries. ©

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He was a wise man who invented beer. Plato.

Here we are in the home of beer, of Budweiser anyway, and my university had no programs in brewing science. Now that looks as if it might be remedied, it’s time to think of the history of brewing as well. Today is a good day for it, the birth-day of the Danish polymath whose very own yeast (Saccharomyces carlsbergensis) revolutionized the brewing of lager and pilsener beers. Born in Ribe, Denmark, on May 8 1842, Emil Christian Hansen did not promise much. His dad, an alcoholic, could claim a stint in the French Foreign Legion, but was a Danish hobo by the time Emil was born. His mother made ends meet as a laundress. But the boy earned money as a painter and financed his own education, graduating from high school at 29. Then it was to the University of Copenhagen, where he financed himself by writing novels, developed a consuming interest in mushrooms (he wrote books about them, too), and upon graduation got a job in the laboratories at Carlsberg brewery, an appropriate berth for a botanist interested in mycology. By 1879, he was head of the laboratory and developing a better yeast to avoid “bad beer sickness”. In 1883 he discovered that beer yeast was actually two species, good and not-so-good. He named the good yeast and devised an efficient way to separate it out. Because Hansen thought science was for the good of humankind, he refused to patent his discovery, and before 1900 virtually all bottom-brewed beers, including Budweiser, used Emil’s processes and Emil’s yeast. A statue in Ribe, “The Yeast Girl,” donated by Chicago’s Institute of Fermentology in 1920, is Hansen’s fitting memorial. ©

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Details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold--everywhere the glint of gold. Howard Carter on his greatest discovery.

In the 19th century, certain social circles regarded frailty in young women as almost a virtue, but not in young men. Thus sickly Francis Parkman and spindly Teddy Roosevelt (to pick two exemplars) went west to toughen up, Parkman in an adventure amongst the Sioux that gave us a literary classic and Roosevelt in ranching that gave us a war hero and president. Across the water, frail young Englishmen could not so easily go west, and so Howard Carter, an infirm lad of artistic bent (his father was a painter), joined an archaeological expedition to Egypt, aged only 17. This did not have the transforming effect on his health that Parkman and Roosevelt enjoyed, but in the desert he certainly made the most of whatever vigor he possessed. Born on May 9, 1874, in London, and reared in Norfolk away from the ‘Great Wen’s’ smoke and smog, Carter would become the world’s most famed Egyptologist. He was supposed to stay in Egypt for only one season, as an illustrator, but he was entranced, stayed, developed a fine talent that went way beyond sketching mummies, and in 1899 was appointed chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. In 1907, having left that service, Carter was employed to lead Lord Carnarvon’s expedition to the Valley of the Kings, where both legend and scholarship pointed towards the existence of the still-sealed tomb of young “King Tut,” possibly yet another delicate boy. In 1922-23, in a dramatic way covered breathlessly by the world’s press, Howard Carter found and then opened the wondrous chambers of Tutankhamun, where he found treasures and fame if not robust health. ©

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Since thou dost give me pains, let me remember thee what thou hast promised. Ariel, in The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2.

All lives turn out to be unlikely journeys (unless, I suppose, you are a statistician), but one of the less likely was that of Chaya Kaufman, born on May 10, 1898 in the Jewish ghetto of Proskurov, the Ukraine. Her parents took her and her five siblings to New York City, whereupon her mother, exhausted by successive childbirths, moved out. Chaya inherited some of that independence and, at the tender age of 11, enrolled herself in the Ferrer Modern School (an anarchist school, if that’s not an oxymoron) and then, at the even tenderer age of 13, married one of her teachers, Will Durant. Her family disapproved of Durant, a “God-forsaken gentile,” and the anarchists didn’t approve, either. So Will resigned, having renamed his sprite-wife Ariel, after Shakespeare. Ariel, true to her new name, immediately flew off to Boston, on a bicycle, but on reflection accepted that her life would be with Will. Will Durant, that is. And so began a remarkable intellectual and domestic partnership that endured for 70 years, ending in 1981 when the two died within a fortnight of each other. Intellectually, the couple moved away from anarchism to a philosophical socialism in which they wished to declare the interdependence of humankind and to render philosophy relevant to real historical problems. One result was Will and Ariel Durant’s monumental Story of Civilization (11 vols.), said to be still worth a read although it’s now out of print. In case you don’t have time to read all eleven, you could sample vol. 10, Rousseau and Revolution, the Pulitzer prizewinner of 1968, still available digitally. ©

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Everyone should have a Lower East Side in their life. Irving Berlin.

Part of the assimilation process for immigrants was to acquire a more “American” name. Sometimes it was imposed on them. Paulette’s great-grandfather Carlsen was made into “Mr. Brown” by a paymaster who had too many Swedes in his workforce. The Beilin family, from Russia, became the Balines. Their son Israel Isadore then underwent a ‘paymaster’ change (a misspelling made him a Berlin) and then to complete the process changed his first name to Irving. Irving Berlin it was, then, who was born in Russia on May 11, 1888, moved to America just in time for the depression of 1893-97, and escaped the sweatshop labor of his parents and siblings by becoming a newsboy, aged 8. Meanwhile he learned to sing from his father, a cantor in the old country, and he learned English on the streets. He learned both well enough to become “America’s songwriter”, having added the piano to his toolbox. At first he sang in saloons and music halls; his first production sold for 37 cents. His first big hit was really big: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911) helped vault ragtime to prominence (and make it a concern of that era’s moral pecksniffs), and Berlin went on to write about 1500 more, including “Easter Parade,” “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones.” “God Bless America,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “White Christmas,” “Always,” “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm,” and so on, and so forth. The love that kept him warm was Ellin Mackay, descended from an earlier line of immigrants (there are a lot of them, too), and they almost made it to the ever after. Ellin died in 1988, Irving as soon as he could, aged 101, in 1989. ©

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Most people are brought up to believe that they are as good as the person next to them. I was told I was better. Katharine Hepburn.

Childhood tragedies can permanently scar a life, and it looked like her brother Tom’s suicide (she discovered the body) would have this impact on Katharine Hepburn. Only 14, Katharine withdrew from school and suspended her very considerable sporting activities. After three years of private tutoring, she consented to ‘come out’ and to attend her mother’s college, Bryn Mawr. There she majored in History and Philosophy, which doubtless did her good, but at college she discovered acting, discovered she had a talent for it, and may also have found in it a release from grief. She also found, yet again, the importance of having family money and exceptionally supportive parents. Born in Hartford, CT, on May 12, 1907, Hepburn was brought up to be what she became, an intelligent, forceful personality, aware of her good fortune and its advantages, and extremely ill-fitted for any conventional view of a woman’s role. Those attitudes transferred whole to Hollywood where she became that rare bird, a star on her own, pretty much independent of the studio system. This owed partly to her personality—which showed through in most of her roles—and partly to her ability to put together her income and her inheritance to establish a degree of financial independence. By the end of the 30s she was literally investing in herself, in classics like The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, and investing also in Spencer Tracy. A self-made woman in the old, classical sense (she put herself together), Hepburn would run her own life for a very long time, finally signing off in 2003 as the greatest actress in 20th-century films. ©

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Germans will soon so outnumber us that we will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. Benjamin Franklin, 1753.

Benjamin Franklin was never in any doubt that immigration was a tonic for the body politic, new blood, new mouths to feed, backs to clothe and hands to work. New brains, too, and one of the reasons that, in Franklin’s day, Pennsylvania was the engine of American economic growth was its status as an immigrant magnet. But Franklin wanted English migrants, and he was getting Germans. One of the more productive of Pennsylvania’s immigrants was Heinrich Wilhelm Stiegel, born in the free city of Cologne on May 13, 1729. In 1750 a string of family misfortunes (including his father’s death) pushed Stiegel, his mother, and his surviving sibling to Pennsylvania, where Germans were congregating (literally, for Lutheranism as well as opportunity were among their aims). He also brought with him skill in ironmaking, learned more at a new ironworks in Lancaster county, and by 1756 he owned the Elizabeth Forge (nicely named but not after Stiegel’s first wife; it was in Elizabeth Township). Entrepreneurial flair brought another forge (charmingly named Charming), then a glassworks (if you find Stiegel glass, hold on to it). His ingenuity improved Ben Franklin’s airtight stove. A new sense of his importance brought him the nickname “Baron” and a bizarre mansion with cannons attached. Lutheran patriotism made him the founder of a proto-utopian community (Manheim) and the donor of its church. And legend has made him the namesake of the Baron Stiegel Lions Club of Ephrata, PA where, one hopes, the new immigrants of our own day can find the sort of friendly welcome and expansive opportunities that Ben Franklin would have denied to Henry William Stiegel.©

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L'etat, c'est moi. Louis XIV of France.

May 14 is a big day in French history, though not quite so big as July 14 (the storming of the Bastille, in 1789). And very different, too. Bastille Day commemorates the Revolution, the death knell of monarchy, the great ideals of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” But on May 14, the French (those, anyway, of monarchical sentiments) remember the accession of two of France’s most successful kings, Louis XIII and Louis XIV, father and son. Both came to the throne as boys, Louis XIII aged 8, on May 14, 1610, and Louis XIV aged 4, on May 14, 1643. By the time Louis XIV died, in 1715, France was the great power of Europe, wealthy beyond measure and stable enough to enjoy Molière’s comedies. But it was not so in 1610. To still the religious wars that convulsed France, the Protestant Henry of Navarre took a Catholic Medici as wife and converted, thinking that peace and Paris were “worth a mass.” But he was assassinated on May 14, 1610, leaving the throne to his child and to Marie di Medici as regent. This did not end the troubles, but after the regency Louis XIII and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, won victories over the Huguenots at home and the Hapsburgs in Europe that laid the groundwork for Louis XIV (once his regency ended) to reduce the nobility from territorial magnates to Versailles courtiers, to consolidate royal power and wealth, and to enjoy France’s longest reign (72 years). He even took on the Church (“has God forgotten all I have done for Him?”) and conquered geography (“the Pyrenees are no more.”) He was, indeed, the Sun King. ©

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While we cannot maintain that in every thing woman is man¹s equal, yet in many things her patience, perseverance and method make her his superior. Williamina Fleming. A naturally clear and brilliant mind. Annie Cannon on Ms Fleming, 1911.

Sometimes human rights advance slowly, as if by accident; capabilities are proven but rest unrecognized. So it was with women in astronomy. And there may be no better example than “Pickering’s Harem,” the dismissive name given to the females hired by Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to 1919. I have already featured three of the “Harem” in these notes. Now here is the very first one. Impatient with his male assistants, Pickering is alleged to have said “my maid could do better,” and promptly hired her. She was Williamina Fleming, born in Dundee, Scotland, on May 15, 1857, into the skilled working class. She became the second wife of a no-good accountant, one Fleming, who got her with child, took her to Boston in 1879 and promptly abandoned her. She found a position as Pickering’s maid of all work, and her employment at the observatory began in 1881. Already having taught school in Dundee, Ms. Fleming was suited to the clerical tasks originally assigned to her, but soon she made the job her own, devising a hydrogen content classification model and, scanning Pickering’s pictures, cataloguing over 10,000 stars and nebulae, including about 1000 that were her own discoveries including the Horsehead Nebula. A clerical ‘error’ (by a male assistant) denied her credit (he erased her name and substituted Pickering’s) but before Williamina died in 1911 she had received proper credit, had published in her own name, and was showered with honors. Her excessively modest obituary in Science, by Annie Jump Cannon (another member of the Harem) is worth a read. ©

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Sensitive mind . . . gracious heart . . . wide interests . . . keen analysis . . . bouyant spirit . . . depths of perception . . . clarity of style. Arthur Hays Sulzberger on Anne McCormick, 1954.

Anne O’Hare McCormick was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, on May 16, 1880, but stayed there not at all. Her American parents spirited her off to, of all places, Columbus, Ohio, where Anne O’Hare received a private, but thoroughly Catholic, education, finishing off at a properly posh Catholic women’s college and properly marrying a Catholic engineer from Dayton named McCormick. The difference was, I suppose, that this McCormick traveled a lot, mainly to Europe, and this Anne O’Hare McCormick was very observant and began to write about it. She’d had minimal journalistic experience in college, but some, and she had connections, and she had confidence, and so where else would she send her stuff but to the New York Times? Just a couple of pieces, but they were well enough liked that in 1921, when she was 41 and the McCormicks were off on another European jaunt (Mr. M. was a buyer for his firm), she asked the managing editor of the Times if she could send in some “dispatches.” “Try it,” said he. In Rome, she wrote “Italy is hearing the master’s voice,” a clever take on a new RCA ad and a prophetic assessment of Benito Mussolini, and for that and other “dispatches” she was hired permanently. Journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick went on to interview many leading European politicians (including Hitler and Stalin), win a raft of prizes including a Pulitzer, become a confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt, garner scores of honorary degrees and other gongs, and as if not content with all this became (1935) the first woman on the “eight-man” editorial board of the Times and (1945-49) helped to shape UNESCO. ©

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When I was young, I was told You will see when you are fifty. I am now fifty, and I haven't seen a thing. Erik Satie.

Across America, it’s graduation weekend, and a common feature of graduation ceremonies is to honor students who have done particularly well. That’s fair enough. It’s our business model. But it’s well to remember that schools are not always the most perceptive assessors of talent. As for predicting “success” later in life, “success” is such a plastic term, so open to idiosyncratic definition, that we now wisely leave it alone, although “most likely to succeed” was once a universal preoccupation of US high school annuals. So what of a student whose teachers labeled him “insignificant and laborious,” “worthless,” “the laziest student” in the school? Of course, that could have been almost anybody: e.g. Albert Einstein or Elton John. But it was in fact Erik Satie whom they judged lacking, and it was understandable, for he was a bit of a slacker. Born on May 17, 1866, and after his mother’s death shuffled around the grandparents, he learned to be ill when convenient (he got out of the army that way) and gave evidence of other character defects when at the Paris Conservatoire, from which he never graduated (the school or the defects). But along the way he picked up some interesting talents with piano and pen and fascinating friends of an evening (par exemple Saint-Saens, Ravel, Cocteau, Picasso) and today we know him as a brilliant composer of oddly entrancing piano pieces, mostly quiet, that can be listened to often because of their surprising twists and turns. We are less aware that Erik Satie was also often in trouble as a gadfly of the Parisian avant-garde, which (perhaps) would not have surprised his teachers. ©

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Design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society. Walter Gropius.

One of those women who gained much fame through their associations with men was Alma Maria Schindler, whose great beauty and lively mind was immortalized by much more than a witty Tom Lehrer lyric (although that’s worth listening to). Alma grew up in the intellectual hothouse of late imperial Vienna, enjoyed a liaison with Gustav Klimt before marrying Gustav Mahler, being psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud, and having an affair with Walter Gropius, whom she married after Mahler’s death. We may get to Alma on August 31, her birthday, but today is the anniversary of Walter Gropius’s birth, in Berlin, on May 18, 1883. Gropius early established a promising career as an architect, working in Berlin with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, but all that was interrupted by his affair with Alma, even more by World War I and Gropius’s astonishing heroism (he was awarded the Iron Cross twice). He divorced Alma in 1920, but he already enjoyed far more lasting fame as chief founder and advocate of the Bauhaus, not only an actual building but a school of art, design, and architecture which transformed modern taste. Bauhaus was a style, and Gropius drew in to Bauhaus such exemplars of modernism as van der Rohe, Paul Klee, Walter Kandinsky, and Ernst May. Utterly antithetical to Nazism, the school closed in 1933; the luckier of its members fled Germany. Gropius himself ended with a successful career at Harvard’s School of Design where he continued his efforts to produce a unified vision of modern life, from roof lines and elevations to door handles and dinner plates. ©

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For those who like Tom Lehrer. Alma.

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In hiding, one of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, was how to think. There was nothing else to do. I thought a lot. Abraham Pais.

One hears the observation that theoretical physicists don’t need laboratories. Working at the far reaches of what can be known, they share much in common with mathematicians and philosophers, and can be imagined as just sitting around, thinking. A blackboard, a lot of chalk, and they are off. An exaggeration, to be sure, but like many mythic tales, there’s some truth to it. Take Abraham Pais, born in Amsterdam on May 19, 1918. Pais went to a special high school and graduated top of his class, especially good at languages, but fascinated by physics in which he got his baccalaureate at 20 and his PhD at 23, in 1941. That was not a good year to be a Jew in Holland; a few days after Pais was doctored the occupying Nazis decreed that henceforth no Jew should read for, far less receive, the doctorate. Worse was to come, and Dr. Pais went into hiding where his gentile colleagues, notably Tina Strobos, kept him safe. On his own, in attic places, and without even blackboard or chalk he began to work out his important contributions to the development of particle physics, including the concepts of “strangeness” that in time would give us quarks and charms and other talismans of the trade. Arrested and tortured right at war’s end, he was saved by the allied advance (one of his friends, arrested with him, was executed), and the connections he had made before the war (e.g. with Niels Bohr) helped him to a fruitful career in America—and access to those laboratories that, clearly, he had not always needed. Meanwhile, his gift for language is also evident in his prize-winning biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord (1982). ©

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Ironic tone, witty criticism, and style that is amusing, clear, rebellious, and simple in its essence. From the citation for Annie Schmidt¹s 1988 Hans Christian Andersen Award in Children¹s Literature.

Though brought up on Wind in the Willows, the Pooh saga, and “The Ugly Duckling,” I must still confess ignorance of the children’s literature of other countries. That’s probably a bad thing, and certainly I had never heard of Anna Maria Geertruida Schmidt, the librarian whose children’s books, all written late in her life, have placed her at #45 in the “Canon of Dutch History,” where she sits along with Anne Frank, the Reformation, Rembrandt, Christian Huygens, and the Rise of the Dutch Republic as a shaper of modern Dutch culture. Annie M. G. Schmidt, as she’s known by generations of Dutch-kids, was born on May 20, 1911, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a Dutch Reformed minister. Even as a child, she took great pleasure in writing, but her teachers thought her not very good at it and she chose other paths, first as an au pair and then as a librarian. After WWII, she wrote for a newspaper, and in 1952 started the Jip en Janneke series and found fame. Soon she branched out into longer fictions, most famously perhaps in Minoes (about a difficult cat that turns into an equally feisty young woman), Otje (a little girl who speaks truth to animals and adults), and A Pond Full of Ink. Minoes (1970) eventually saw light of day as a popular international film, and won first prize at a Chicago festival in 2002. Annie’s stories (to quote the Canon entry) praise people who “go against the grain in a bourgeois society.” And so did Annie herself, choosing euthanasia to end her own life, surrounded by her family and friends, on May 21, 1995. In Holland, Annie is now as famed for that as for her stories.©

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Weight, ready for flight, 700 pounds. Weight, packed for shipment, 1,050 pounds. Price, complete for shipment... $5,500 From Curtiss's first aircraft advertising booklet, 1912.

Those who forget that it’s possible to be smart and uneducated can call Bill Gates to request a reminder. But Gates at least suffered high school, and we go further back for a definable population that combined success in science with dropping out of school. Out of that large ‘n’, consider Glenn Hammond Curtiss, whose origin (May 21, 1878) was not entirely humble (he was born in Hammondsport, NY) but who certainly quit school at 13, partly because it was still OK to do so and partly because he preferred to tinker with speed. Then the speediest thing a teenaged boy could mess about with was the bicycle. He started on one given him by grandmamma, earning money as a Western Union delivery boy, but by age 20 he had his own cycle shop and a patient wife. The next stage was to put an engine on a bike, whereupon he discovered the need for a stronger frame and a lighter engine. Within four years he’d put that together to found Curtiss Manufacturing, a firm making the “Hercules” motorbike with an air-cooled engine. At about this time, the Wright brothers were making history, and Curtiss decided that his formula of light engines plus strong frames plus appropriate mechanics could improve on their “flying machine” (which they steered, for instance, by warping the wings). Curtiss’s early success drew the attention of Alexander Graham Bell, yet another drop-out, and in Canada they joined forces to create a modern plane, with rudders and ailerons, a stressed-metal frame, and a lightweight V8 engine. Along the way, whether on bike, motorbike, or airplane, Curtiss developed a reputation as a daredevil. But he died in 1930 of a botched appendectomy. Doubtless his surgeon had been to high school. ©

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At last I could work with true independence . . . . I knew who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live. Mary Cassatt, 1877.

In the 19th century American money, often newly minted, traveled to Europe to take a grand tour, soak up the culture, and engage in affairs of the heart with impecunious aristocrats. In Henry James’s fiction and in real life, “money” was often a young Yankee heiress, not always naive. Jenny Jerome, for instance, bagged a Churchill within a few weeks of landfall, probably deliberately, and the families haggled for months over money. Little Mary Stevenson Cassatt arrived in France in 1855, aged 11 and not looking for a husband. She came from old money (birthed by land, stocks, railroads on May 22, 1844), sailed to Europe already civilized, and polished herself up further by getting right on the ground floor of the impressionist movement. Mary met artists of all sorts at the 1855 Paris World’s Fair and, in the 1860s, chose skilled masters as her mentors. In 1868 she had a canvas accepted by the Salon, and returned to Europe after the Franco-Prussian War determined to make her career as an artist, despite prejudices against women—particularly American heiresses—undertaking such work. When Impressionism burst on the scene in the 1870s she was ready for it, and was invited to join the movement by Edgar Degas, with whom she developed an intimate artistic relationship despite disagreements about politics (she a feminist and friend of the Dreyfus family). She became one of the three “grandes dames” of impressionism, along with Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond. Two of Mary Cassatt’s paintings can be seen in the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park. Chicago has dozens, including sketches. Mary Cassatt’s reputation is secure and outshines Jenny Churchill’s. ©

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

Although my database is anecdotal and personal, I’ve concluded that small-town Iowa has a great capacity for producing women of remarkable talent and ambition. Today is the birth-date of yet another one, born Belle Aurelia Babb near Burlington on May 23, 1846. Her father had ambition, too, so he abandoned farm and family to seek his fortune as a 49er. Belle, her mother, and her brother Washington Irving Babb moved to Mount Pleasant, a Methodist town with a Methodist college, where Aurelia became Arabella and graduated valedictorian in 1862. Iowa lost more men, proportionately, in the Civil War than any other state, so it was a good year for a young lady to go on the job market, and Arabella Babb took a teaching job in Indianola, but as a placeholder for she aimed to return to Mount Pleasant to marry her professor, John Mansfield, which she did in 1864. Mansfield believed in women’s rights and so encouraged Arabella to study for the law in her brother’s law office. But Arabella could not be a lawyer in Iowa (or in any other US state). It was, so to speak, against the law. But she could take the bar exam, and did, passing with flying colors. Then, in an 1869 case that has resonance with today’s same-sex marriage cases, Arabella Mansfield sued Iowa and the Iowa Bar for her equal rights. And surprisingly enough, the Iowa Supreme Court could find no reason why a lady should, by that sole reason, forfeit her right to practice law. Having proved her point by becoming the first woman lawyer in the USA, Arabella resumed her teaching career, which was a distinguished one as you might expect, given she was an Iowa girl.©

[Stanley]

These are the times that try men's souls. . . Thomas Paine, December 1776.

The European revolutions of 1848 created a wave of popular sympathy in the USA and left its heroes’ names (e.g. Iowa’s Kossuth County) scattered across our landscape. It is less well known that their failure in 1848 was linked viscerally with the German uprising in St. Louis that in 1861 kept Missouri in the Union. Our German immigrants had seen one Junker class in Prussia. They didn’t need another in freedom’s land. An even less well known but more iconic connection between “1848” and American liberal patriotism was a painting executed in a Dusseldorf studio: it is Emanuel Leutze’s heroic rendering of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which now hangs in the Met in New York City. Leutze, born in Germany on May 24, 1816, lived in America as a child. There he fashioned his driving ambition to be an artist but found he needed training in Europe. Longing to return to the US, he set up shop in Dusseldorf where he acquired a good reputation as a portraitist (and as a host to visiting Yanks). His longing to return to America was sharpened by the 1848 revolutions, and it was to encourage the revolutionaries that he chose as his subject one of the darkest days of the American Revolution, Washington’s Christmas day attack across the Delaware, amidst ice floes but trending towards victory. In 1859, Leutze finally got his wish and returned to the USA, where he painted suitably patriotic (northern patriotic) canvasses, including a libel on Chief Justice Taney pondering the fate of Dred Scot that apparently offends Antonin Scalia, and Westward the Course of Empire, already mentioned in these notes. Emanuel Leutze was working on a big treatment of The Emancipation of the Slaves when he died, in DC, of a heat stroke, in 1868. ©

[Stanley]

I've never considered myself a happy woman. But I'm a cheerful woman, Work kept me going. Beverly Sills.

Belle Miriam “Bubbles” Silverman grew up in Brooklyn, where she was born on May 25, 1929. Her parents were foreign, but then it was Brooklyn and it was normal for kids to speak two or three languages. Belle mastered five. She also won a toddler talent contest aged three and soon sang professionally (on a kids’ radio program) every Saturday. Her mom dreamed of her becoming a Jewish Shirley Temple, but in case that didn’t pan out, Bubbles took voice lessons from a classical coach. There was a big difference between singing ditties on talent shows and grand opera. Bubbles made that transition, and with a vengeance, but first she won a CBS radio talent contest, and changed her name to Beverly Sills. Her father then insisted she get an actual education, which she did before taking off on tours doing (first) Gilbert & Sullivan and (finally) Verdi and Donizetti. On tour, she met and married the heir of the Cleveland Plain Dealer family, Peter Greenough, acquiring three stepchildren and then two of her own, which interrupted her singing career (her own children were born severely handicapped, which gave her a lifelong interest in medical philanthropy). But Beverly Sills returned to singing, in Boston, and then enjoyed wildly successful lead role debuts at the opening of Lincoln Center’s Opera House in 1966, La Scala in 1969, Covent Garden in 1970. Thus it was that Bubbles, the name she kept, became America’s favorite soprano before she retired to become one of the most successful opera managers in US history, magnificently reviving the opera company that had given Beverly her New York debut. ©

[Stanley]

People can hang on to life through the most atrocious circumstances if they can find something outside themselves to concentrate on. Henriette Roosenburg

At the war’s end in Europe, 1945, peace brought the problems of repatriation, as untold numbers had been displaced and now were eager to return home. At the notorious Waldheim Prison in Saxony, four Dutch prisoners, three women and a man, heroes of the resistance who had been captured, sent to Waldheim, and sentenced to death, were liberated by the Russians on May 6, 1945. Battered by torture, emaciated by hunger, and one (a woman named Fafa) suffering from crippling arthritis, they began to make their way home. Among their obstacles was a general prohibition on movement and among their dangers was that they would be mistaken for Germans by Russian soldiers intent on revenge for the manifold atrocities of Hitler’s drang nach Osten. One of them was a 29-year old, a courier for the Dutch resistance, codenamed Zip. “Zip” was born rich, May 26, 1916, as Henriette Roosenburg, and was a graduate student at the University of Leiden when the Netherlands was overrun and occupied. She quickly fell in with the Resistance, and was a successful courier-agent. Arrested in late 1944, she kept her and her fellow prisoners’ morale up by developing a tap-tap code for communication and embroidering an iconography of their experiences, the last of which was a crude gun, for they had heard the gunfire of their approaching liberators. Henriette and her friends did indeed make their way back to Holland where she began a successful career as a journalist for an American news magazine. Her terrible tale can be followed through her memoir, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, published in 1957. ©

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A critical, inspiring teacher, a loyal friend and a contributor to the common good to whom the whole world is indebted. Citation for the Lasker Award, given to Conrad Elvehjem in 1952.

The Wisconsin Idea, a child of the Progressive era, was that a public university seeks new knowledge, educates the citizenry, and serves society as a critical focal point for needed reforms. One of the Idea's main pillars was research, and a monument to that research is the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), now donating about $70 million a year to university research. Its wealth derives in large part from the generosity of science faculty at Madison who gifted their patents to the university, starting with Harry Steenbock’s 1920s discovery of how to fortify milk with additional D vitamin. Steenbock paid $300 of his own money to register the patent and then turned it over to the University. The foundation was erected to manage the income. More famous (and even more lucrative) was Warfarin, the rat poison (it has a zillion other uses) actually named after the foundation. Dead rats paid for my Oxford fellowship in 1969-70. Another scientist who gave his patents to WARF was Conrad Elvehjem, born of poor immigrant stock in rural Wisconsin on May 27, 1901, educated under the Wisconsin Idea, and destined for a distinguished career in biochemistry rising eventually to the university presidency. His major discovery was the isolation and synthesis of a rare vitamin complex that is an effective treatment for pellagra. It also went to WARF. Elvejhem’s leadership and financial generosity are recognized today in the names of several university research awards and scholarships, the university’s art collection, and a charming Madison public park that serves also as a learning ground for the Elvehjem Elementary School. After Conrad’s death, aged only 61, his wife Constance continued his philanthropic leadership until she passed from the Madison scene in 1999. ©