BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Diet as moral principle.

He will select the choicest food stuffs. These will consist of fruits, nuts, legumes, and dextrinized grains,—that is, well-toasted grain preparations, toasted bread, toasted wheat flakes, etc. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in his The Living Temple (Good Health Publishing Co., Battle Creek, Michigan, 1903).

So Dr. Kellogg advised us all, women too: if we would live long lives, enjoy the esteem of our neighbors, work profitably and usefully, and parent children who had the potential (and the inclination) to emulate our success. But if good diet drives good lives, bad diet must lead us into perditions (plural). So Kellogg told his readers to avoid ‘bad’ foods. Condiments were especially hazardous, meat almost as bad (Kellogg’s views on eating ‘corpses’ were ethical as well as scientific); indulgence in meats or spices would stimulate lust, a subject on which Kellogg waxed especially poetic and a vice which (in its multitudinous forms) would, he knew, lead us all into disease and dissolution. Of course there was more to it than diet. After peppers, mustards, ginger and pork chops—but not too far behind—came the dangers of gluttony, sentimental literature, and the waltz (indeed any form of what Kellogg called “round dancing,” as opposed, perhaps, to square dancing). The best diet in the world would also be severely tested by long engagements or, horrors, coeducational nurseries. After the age of innocence, which according to Kellogg ended when the child was 4 or 5, he or she should be carefully segregated from she or he, lest lust take them all. Poor John Harvey Kellogg!! He lived far enough into the 20thcentury to become panic-stricken. But he was born in what seemed to him a purer time, February 26, 1852. When he was a boy, his family moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, and started a broom factory. They did well, and John received the best education (in medicine) that money could buy, married well, fostered 42 children, caused ructions in his local Seventh-Day Adventist church, and became quite famous as the chief medical officer of the church’s Battle Creek Sanitarium where he was a devotee of nuts and grains diets—and cared for many famous patients (from George Bernard Shaw to William Howard Taft, the latter certainly guilty of gluttony). Meanwhile, John Kellogg and his brother Will founded a company where they toasted nuts and grains into cereal, and after John bailed this became the W. H. Kellogg Company whose most famous product today is toasted corn flakes: toasted, of course, for to cook food was to civilize it. John, meanwhile, developed some ideas about sex that now seem very odd and some ideas about race that are very objectionable. Luckily, we bought only the corn flakes, an excellent example of consumer restraint. Otherwise, I fear, we as a culture have not been good at following the Kellogg rules. Personally, I blame the waltz. ©.

[Stanley]

aka Brandeis v. Trump, 2024

The function of a state Legislature in ratifying a proposed amendment to the federal Constitution, like the function of Congress in proposing the amendment, is a federal function derived from the federal Constitution; and it transcends any limitations sought to be imposed by the people of a state. US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, delivering the Court’s unanimous (9-0) verdict in the case of Leser et al. v. Garnett et al., February 27, 1922.

In our latter days of the great American republic, there is an argument that the separate states are supreme enough that a state legislature could, if taken by the spirit, overrule its own citizens’ vote and refuse to certify the presidential election in that state, and instead return the legislature’s own “electors” to cast the state’s votes for a losing candidate. If logic ruled, I suppose this means that the legislature in question could return any other name, a local sanitary inspector or dog catcher for instance. But in 2020 the ‘other name’ was Donald J. Trump, the losing candidate who decided—in states where he had lost narrowly—to overturn the majority vote via the state’s legislative power to be its own master (and your master, and my master). This peculiar recrudescence of the old states’ rights theory was dubious enough to lead Trump (and/or his minions) to use various subterfuges, some of which may be found to have been criminal. I await the juries’ verdicts with bated breath. However they turn out, it’s necessary to note that the old, tattered, and blood-stained theory of state supremacy was killed at birth, or aborted, when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 disregarded the instructions of several state legislatures to amend the Articles of Confederation and, instead, created a wholly new compact. The Founding Fathers (and they were 100% male, as far as one can tell by appearances) then underlined their radicalism by referring their creation back to specially-elected ratifying conventions, not to the legislatures. And the coup de grace to state supremacy was made clear in the first three words of the new Constitution, “We, the People.” Our political fathers may have been male but they weren’t fools. They bypassed the states to create a “federal” system, so mixed that, in Justice Brandeis’s precise words, states do have federal functions. In general, these can be characterized as duties which they are obliged to carry out, for instance (in Leser v. Garnett) to accept the validity of a certified constitutional amendment or, in the case of We, the People v. Trump, to certify the results of an election. But, like the bad penny it is, states’ rights keeps turning up, most notably to preserve racial slavery (in 1861-65) and then, almost but not quite forever, to protect white supremacy in our era of apartheid. In 1922, to protect the right of two Maryland citizens (one white, one black, both female) to vote, Justice Brandeis offered a solution to what is, but should not be, our present dilemma. ©

[Stanley]

The perils of success.

The earth can have but earth, which is his due: My spirit is thine, the better part of me. From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76, chosen as Harry H. Steptoe’s epitaph by his wife Maureen Crombie.

In Britain (and still in several Commonwealth countries) the great and the good are rewarded in two annual “Honours Lists”: New Year’s Day and on the sovereign’s official birthday. “The great” and “the good” are not often identical categories, but there are enough of each that the lists are long, sometimes very long. Both were instituted by Queen Victoria, and many of the lists may be consulted in Wikipedia. The New Year’s Honours for 1976 included hundreds made ‘Officers of the Order of the British Empire,’ OBE for short, of whom about 200 were British civilians. In its diversities were included Jacqueline du Pré, the young and tragically gifted cellist, and Elizabeth David, the queen of the bourgeois kitchen. The 1976 list also included four Corbetts, including Harry Corbett and Harry H. Corbett. They were unrelated, and the second one had invented the “H.” middle initial in order to avoid being confused with the first, a master puppeteer. A master of accents, the second Harry joked (in Cockney rhyming slang) that it stood for “hennyfink” (anything). In 1976, this Harry H. was known to millions as Harold Steptoe, the ‘son’ in the Steptoe and Son TV sitcom, a nine-year wonder that had ended with a Christmas Special in 1974. In the sitcom, Albert Steptoe, father, and Harold, son, were rag and bone men, junk dealers. Albert (played by Wilfred Bramble), was old, toothless, unshaven, selfish, and cynical. Harold was young, rather shaggy, prone to flights of hope, and to their inevitable crash landings. They were indeed an odd couple, perfect for comedy, and Steptoe and Son was a great comedy series. But sadly, Harry H. Corbett was not playing a role he wanted. He’d been born in Rangoon, truly a child of the empire, on February 28, 1925. An unhappy war experience (after VJ day, wiping up remnant Japanese soldiers in New Guinea) left him with a jumpy stomach, an eye wound, and bad memories. In the end, he deserted, but you don’t shoot deserters in peacetime, and once back in London he developed a taste for acting. Shaggy, dark, and moody, he learned his stuff at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the East End (which is where he may have picked up his Cockney), and he learned well. He led as Richard III and then Macbeth in important Shakespeare productions, was widely praised, and thus came to the attention of the creative team behind Steptoe and Son. During its long run, and after, Corbett felt he’d been imprisoned in Harold Steptoe. This may have caused his issues with alcohol, which were not helped by Wilfred Bramble’s frequent binges, on the set and off. In any case, Harry H. Corbett, OBE, died too young, and too sadly, in 1982. ©

[Stanley]

I got this message from Bob during the night.

A Freudian pratfall?
I have made many a slip, but few quite as Freudian as my beginning quotation this morning from the epitaph of HARRY H. CORBETT, OBE. He was NOT Harry "Steptoe". Indeed, that identity issue seems to have been at least part of his problem. My apologies to all readers, and for that matter to Harry H. Corbett's shade, wherever that dwells. Harry Corbett, OBE, the master puppeteer and philanthropist, can presumably take care of himself.

[Stanley]

And his ungrateful children.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child. King Lear, in Shakespeare’s play, Act I, scene 4.

In the early summer of 1966, before marriage but preparing for it, Paulette and I moved our belongings from locations in Iowa to Madison, Wisconsin. The first consignment was mainly books, clothes, kitchen utensils, and a couple of typewriters. Then we took furniture, mainly ‘early in-law’ but most memorably a hide-a-bed given to us by Miss Jo Thielen, my mother’s Latin teacher and basketball coach. Both adventures included U-Haul® rentals. First a one-way trailer and secondly a truck that had to be returned to base. This flexibility was a big plus for a couple of grad students who were short of money and rushed for time. Little did we know that U-Haul ® was a new company, founded in 1945 by Leonard Samuel Shoen and his wife Anna. They were then living on Anna’s family ranch. Leonard, thinking of resuming his education (after his war service), wanted to be seen to be doing something useful. Noting a lot of people then on the move, he built a single trailer to rent out (and of course to return) and called it a “U-Haul.” The nation itself was on the move, returning vets and their partners chasing jobs and/or education and/or housing, and Leonard Shoen was an entrepreneurial young man. So by 1949 U-Haul was an incorporated company with franchises scattered all over the country, and the ‘one-way rental’ had entered the national vocabulary. It was a modern miracle. The main maker of this miracle, Leonard “Sam” Shoen, was born on February 29, 1916, in rural Minnesota. When Sam was 7, the family moved west to farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Sam wanted to be a doctor, graduated BSc from Oregon State University, and went almost all the way through med school. The war, marriage, and U-Haul intervened but he did in 1955 earn a law degree. Along the way he qualified also as a fairly fanatical family man, which in the end proved his downfall. Four marriages (Anna died in 1957) later, Sam had a dozen children to his name, and in the early 1980s he transferred about 98% of his stockholdings (in U-Haul and its related companies) to all of them, apparently in equal shares. Opinion is mixed on why he did this, but unanimous in judging it foolish. Instead of being familial partners, several of Sam’s kids conspired to force Sam out. Sam and several other of his kids sued back. They won a huge judgment, Trumpian in amount (negotiated down to $471 million!!) but they did not get the company back. Unlike Lear, Sam Shoen knew exactly which of his children were thankless, but it brought him no comfort. He died, an apparent suicide, in Las Vegas, in 1999. Perhaps encouraged by our rentals, he had moved his U-Haul there in 1967. ©

[Stanley]

The Lincoln of our literary culture?

Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine, but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any stage. William Dean Howells to Mark Twain, February 28, 1906.

By the time this letter was written, the author and its recipient were old old friends. Near contemporaries, they’d met in 1869, both struggling for acceptance as serious writers, Howells a little ahead at that time. If there was an American literary establishment, Howells had already knocked at its door and (in 1865) been allowed in, if only as assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly. But he was an outsider, not quite as ‘outside’ as Mark Twain, but certainly not born to the purple. William Dean Howells was born in Ohio on March 1, 1837, the son of an eccentric newspaper editor. Like Twain, he spent some of his youth as a printer’s devil, ink-stained rather than book-learned. But he’d been quicker to take up writing. While young Twain was learning how to pilot a Mississippi paddle-wheeler, Howells was reading leading European authors (in French and German), writing poetry, and making himself known to Ohio Republicans and New England intellectuals. In 1860 this landed Howells the potentially thankless task of writing Abraham Lincoln’s campaign biography, but he did it well enough to secure a consul’s post in Italy and a remarkable wife, Elinor Mead. She was of the New England elite, but came equipped with a spice of non-conformity, and (as Howells grew in stature and reputation) to help him make their home—which she designed—a cordial meeting place for many sorts, including even such apparent opposites as Henry James and Mark Twain (although Elinor never approved of Twain’s whiskeys and cigars). His own western background and meteoric rise made it easier for Howells to see Twain as a worthy, and his reviews of Twain’s work (Howells edited the Atlantic from 1871 to 1881) helped Twain establish himself as a New England literary gentleman—and with a Connecticut mansion to match. Knowing who Twain was and who he became, Howells always called him “Mark.” When Twain died Howells eulogized him as “the Lincoln of our literature” (In My Mark Twain, 1910). It’s a brilliant phrase, originating in Howells’ own life story. Howells also advocated for other realists (e.g. Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Hamline Garland) and for the oddest outsider of them all, Emily Dickinson. And in his own novels, for instance The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) he proved to be a master of social realism. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Howells created characters recognizable as ordinary folk living ordinary lives—and no less interesting for that. In William Dean Howells’ America, we can all be outsiders which, for citizens of a democracy, is a vital gift. ©.

[Stanley]

The musical as an American(?) art form.

Oh the shark has, pretty teeth, dear,
And it shows them pearly white.
Just a jackknife, has Macheath, dear,
And he keeps it out of sight. ‘Mack the Knife,’ from The Threepenny Opera (1928).

The musical, we are informed by the Library of Congress (loc.gov), is a “quintessentially American art form.” Well, perhaps, but when the Library tells us who made the musical sing (its miracle decade was the 1920s) we find mainly immigrants (Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, Englishmen) and second-generation or ‘new’ Americans like Jerome Kern and the Gershwin boys (Ira and George), sprouts sprung from the ‘new’ immigration of the late 19th century. By syllogistic logic, we must conclude that immigrants are “quintessentially American.” That would be a good moral lesson for today, but we should also recognize that something very like the modern musical was emerging in Europe, too, often in comic form (Gilbert & Sullivan in London and Franz Lehar in Vienna). But in 1920s Berlin, culturally tempest-tossed as it was, something even more like the “American” musical began to draw good talent and large audiences. That was thanks to many people, not least a young Saxon Jew (a phrase to conjure with) born in the Jewish Quarter of Dessau, Saxony, on March 2, 1900: his name was Kurt Weill. Young Weill grew up in a religious family, probably turned towards music by his cantor father, Albert Weill. But his talents (as composer and player) broke him into secular circles, first at the local theater and then, in 1918, at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, where he studied under Engelbert Humperdinck. But Berlin in the 1920s was a great place to be exposed to new cultural trends, politically leftish and artistically outrageous, and Weill jumped right in, as both beer cellar pianist and avant-garde composer. Soon he met Lotte Lenya (1898-1981) and Berthold Brecht (1898-1956). He married Lotte and collaborated with Brecht, and together they produced classics of musical theater, popular and trend-setting (so long as the Weimar Republic survived). Undoubtedly their greatest work was a rehash of a very old classic, John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera (1728) which (starring Lotte Lenya and rechristened as The Threepenny Opera—Die Dreigroschenoper) they staged in 1928. The partnership didn’t last. Explaining the end of the Brecht-Weill collaboration, Lenya later wrote that Weill found it impossible to set The Communist Manifesto to music. In any case the rise of Hitler sent them all packing. Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill divorced and then, in 1937, remarried, and became active in American theater, film, and musical work. At first, Die Dreigroschenoper didn’t travel as well. But in my lifetime it’s become a classic American musical. Almost like apple pie. ©

[Stanley]

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. Rudyard Kipling.

Some people are embarrassed to say they came from East St. Louis—but now more people want to claim it. Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Although there are hopeful signs of regional interdependence, the city of St. Louis, MO, has not, historically, been a supportive neighbor to East St. Louis. IL. Gutted by railroad rights of way and then by diabolically-designed interstate highway junctions, our Illinois suburb is the poor relation we’d rather forget. But when an East St. Louisan (ESL) triumphs, as it were against all odds, we think again. At least sometimes. Hank Bauer, born there, became a baseball legend, but not with the Cardinals. Another ESL native, Dick Durbin, has become a power in the US Senate, and we really should be nicer to him. He cares more for urban America than our own Missouri Senators do. We’ve done better (when he became famous) with the musical genius of Miles Davis, and better yet with Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the extraordinary sportswoman who was born in East St. Louis on March 3, 1962 and grew up to become (according to Sports Illustrated) the greatest female athlete of all time. We—or our regional transit authority—even named a Metrolink station after her. But it’s not in St. Louis, MO. It's the fourth station after you cross the river, in East St. Louis, IL, and it’s located right next to the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Community Center, the bricks-and-mortar expression of the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation, also based in East St. Louis. She’s its leading spirit, “A Gold Medal Human” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Riverfront Times, St. Louis’s ‘alternative journalism’ newspaper, calls her (in a 2023 piece) “The Olympian Who Won’t Give Up On East St. Louis.” Her “JJK Center” acts as the fulcrum for a number of public-private partnerships that aim to rescue her birth city from the fate to which it was assigned by deliberate planning decisions. So the JJK is not about “West” St. Louis, but as importantly not East St. Louis itself. It’s concerned with East St. Louis people, especially young people. The foundation’s website puts the case thus: “the limitations of a city shrouded in stereotypes don’t have to limit the course of a child’s future. Their first steps to greatness start here.” To help kids break through those ‘made-in-the-USA’ boundaries, it offers education, recreation, and (of course) sports training, and most recently (2023) something even more fundamental, another public-private partnership designed to push good diet and purposeful grocery shopping—and a kitchen garden, at the JJK Center, as a working example. Joyner-Kersee’s birthplace, on Piggott Avenue, is now a derelict lot surrounded by interstates and railyards. Her JJK Center and its foundation’s HQ are worlds away in promise, but they are still in the heart of East St. Louis. ©.

[Stanley]

Searching for a working class literature.

I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn't know is there, and he'll never know what's there because he's stupid. I suppose you'll laugh at this, me saying the governor's a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He's stupid, and I'm not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.
--Alan Sillitoe, “Loneliness and the Long Distance Runner,” 1960.

As part of my doctoral program in history, I took a PhD seminar in American Literature, “Radical Literature of the 1930s,” brilliantly taught by Walter Rideout. For my research paper I read working class fictions written by working class authors for working class audiences. Thanks to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s brilliantly patient Miss Ruth Davis, I found socialist newspapers (one out of St. Paul, the other printed in Kenosha) which ran short stories contributed by readers. It was an interesting disappointment. The writers may have been working class. The readership was. The fictions were not. Editorially these papers argued for nationalized industries, state subsidies for farmers and workers, union rights for both. Only mass action could pull their readers up from the depths of the Great Depression. Their fictions told different stories, of the Horatio Alger genre. Keep your nose clean. Do what the boss tells you. Work hard for individual success, then enjoy it as your own just reward. I should have looked elsewhere for a class-conscious “working class literature,” maybe to the English Midlands where (in Nottingham), the writer Alan Sillitoe was born on March 4, 1928, swaddled in the clothes of generational privation. His illiterate father, a laborer in the Raleigh bicycle factory, was a tyrant at home when not rendered insensible by drink. Alan failed his grammar school exams and, at 14, inevitably one must say, joined the Raleigh work force. He found some escape in reading, relaxation in serial sexual adventures, but his life’s plot was changed by the deus ex machina of a world at war. Too young to fight fascism, he joined in 1945 and went out to Malaya to help Britain reinvent western imperialism by suppressing the natives. There Sillitoe contracted tuberculosis and was demobbed on a miserly military pension. It went further in Spain, where Sillitoe broadened his reading and found a new circle of friends and a wife. He began work on his first, most famous, novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Published in 1958 and translated onto film (by Karl Reisz, in 1960) it made Sillitoe’s reputation as a writer of unvarnished prose and a maker of unvarnished plots. He was occasionally guilty of happy endings, but he was best at depicting lives which had no very clear reason to expect happy endings. He continued to write until he died, in 2010, still married to that woman he’d met in Spain (the American poet Ruth Fainlight). By then, aged 82, he’d accumulated a substantial net worth. With copyright income, it’s now thought to be £13 million. Alan Sillitoe would have thought that a happy ending. ©.

[Stanley]

erratum
It was Bob Bliss, not Alan Sillitoe, who wrote the words "Loneliness and the Long-Distance Runner." Sillitoe's title story in his first collection of short fiction was "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner." It's about a ne'er do well who gets sent to a Borstal for being a ne'er to well and learns almost as much as he might have learned in a grammar school. I thank my most constant reader, Paulette, for spotting this large mistake about small words.

[Stanley]

She sold time for a living.

. . . Father said that locks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. Quentin Compson, in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Quentin was obsessed with “time was” when life for the Compson family had been better, before Quentin had been told (twice) the daemonic history of Thomas Sutpen, before his sister’s dishonor, before everything. We could say that when Quentin suicided he also killed time. Most of us learn (usually from our elders) that ‘time is precious.’ There are, also, clichés about buying time, not to mention the modern management mantra of ‘just in time’ supply chains and the commerce known as ‘logistics.’ In this sense the world-wide Covid epidemic can be quantified and costed in accounting terms (because ‘time is money’ and Covid wasted time). But in 19th-century London, a family had actually prospered by selling time—the time of day, by the clock, Greenwich Mean—and for a set price. This curious business was started by John Henry Belville (1795-1856). He was an orphan of the French Revolution, but one with the good fortune of having, for his guardian, John Pond. In 1811, Pond was appointed Astronomer Royal. He took the boy with him to the Greenwich Observatory as his assistant. Belville learned the trade well enough to be kept on when Pond retired, when he became the Royal Observatory’s time keeper—and time seller. London had a time industry, and an important specialty was making precision clocks, not of the grandfather or carriage kind, but ‘chronometers.’ These were vital aids to ship navigation, and (no doubt) to the ship insurers of Lloyds of London. Belville carried a special ‘pocket’ chronometer to London’s chronometer makers (about 200 of them) so they could set their new instruments, exactly, to Observatory time. Belville died in 1856, the new-fangled telegraph made his daily round technologically obsolete, but chronometer-makers proved a cranky lot, traditionalists, and so the business was kept up by Belville’s third wife and their only daughter, Ruth Naomi Belville, born on March 4, 1851. Despite the telegraph, and then the telephone, and then the BBC, and despite fierce competition from The Standard Time Company, so-called, Ruth Naomi kept the Belville business going. Of course she’d had to do other things (she taught French and music, privately) to keep body and soul together. As Miss Belville became an elderly person (for whom time must have been extraordinarily precious), she became modestly famous: well enough loved that, when she finally retired in 1940 (!!!) her pension was paid by the Worshipful Company of Clock Makers. When she passed, in 1943, it was (inevitably) said that time had died. But as we all know, she had not killed it. ©

[Stanley]

A woman of staying power.

May our Lord Jesus Christ preserve you, O Queen, who excel all those of your sex in the amiability of your way of life. From the ‘Encomium Emmae Reginae,’ ca. 1041 CE.

The very long and (each in its own way) influential reigns of Elizabeth I, Victoria and Elizabeth II can obscure from us moderns the fact that English queens regnant have been rare birds indeed. Monarchical blood, like property and power, flowed through the male line, and there was usually, on the death of a king, a male heir available. This (male) heritability did not always make for good monarchs, as Tom Paine delightedly pointed out in 1776, but it was the custom of the culture. Most queens became queens not by right (suo jure) but by marrying the right man before or after he ascended to the throne. The woman sat to the man’s side as queen consort, and “amiability” was something one could praise her for. But Queen Emma of Normandy, or as she was known to the English Queen Ælfgifu, was so unusually amiable that she married two kings, first Æthelred the Unready of the Anglo-Saxons and then the very ready Cnut of the Danes. Because of the unsettledness of the times, that made her, serially, queen consort of England (1002-1013), Denmark (1018-1035), and Norway (1028-1035). As if that were not enough, she birthed (by Æthelred and Cnut, serially, two kings of the English, Harthacnut (son of Cnut who reigned 1040-42) and Edward the Confessor (son of Æthelred who ruled 1042-1066). Of course giving birth is woman’s work, but Emma of Normandy lived long enough (she died on March 6, 1052, aged about 68) to become not only a fit subject for an “Encomium” but a power herself, a leading player in dynastic intrigue who maintained her position in times that included executions, disfigurements (the blinding of her son Alfred Ætheling was particularly gruesome, to make him unfit for kingship), and the occasional invasion. When her son Edward the Confessor (Alfred’s brother) came to power in 1042, she was accused of treason (against Edward). The charge may have had some merit. But she was able to have her extensive English landholdings restored to her, thus her wealth, and (one assumes) her amiability. When she died she was accorded a regal funeral, and was buried at Winchester cathedral next to her husband, Cnut, and their son, Harthacnut. Six centuries later, during the English Civil Wars, their bones were disinterred by disrespectful republicans, but Emma of Normandy was a stayer, and after monarchy was restored in 1660, these royal bones (Emma’s, Cnut’s, and Hartacnut’s, and maybe some others) were recovered and reinterred. You can see the communal mortuary chest still in place today in the newer Winchester Cathedral. If you should do that, think on Queen Emma, her amiability, and her power. ©.

[Stanley]

Woman Driver!!!

It seems I was born adventurous and grew up insufficiently socialized. Janet Guthrie, interview in the Indianapolis Star, 2017.

Tradition means a lot at the Indianapolis 500. That’s why they still call it “The Brickyard,” though the last bricks, those in the home stand straightaway, disappeared in 1961 (the rest of the track was tarmacked in 1938!). It’s still customary for the winning driver (and the winning pit team) to “kiss the bricks.” As far as I know, the Indy’s 3.2 million bricks are still there, under the asphalt, silent witnesses to the force of the past. Another tradition was that Indy 500 drivers were men. So there was hell to pay when (in 1976) the innovative designer Rollo Vollstedt (1919-2018) hired Janet Guthrie to drive his Indy 500 entry. Innovation was OK when it came to air foils and rear engines, but not in the case of a female at the wheel. At The Brickyard, “woman driver” was not just a bad joke; it was an oxymoron. Some of the comments were ugly. One driver told Vollstedt that “our blood is going to be on your hands if you don’t pull her out.” The cry from the stands was “get the tits out of the pits.” Uglier still? Or just vulgar? A few drivers, notably Mario Andretti, were welcoming, but there was a sigh (if real men sigh) of relief when, in 1976, the Guthrie-Vollstedt team failed to qualify. But Janet Guthrie, again racing for Team Vollstedt, did qualify in 1977, and (Andretti remembered) she was good. She was cautious, taking a chance only when it seemed a good one, and, Mario said, you felt safe with her at that wheel. But the chances she took were good enough ones that she finished 9th, a great result for a first go. And Janet Guthrie is still around to tell the tale, and retell it: for instance in her autobiography, subtitled A Life at Full Throttle. It took her 20 years to write it. She started in in 1985, after retiring from slightly more than 20 years of racing. Janet Guthrie was born in Iowa City on March 7, 1938. Both parents were pilots, and Janet got her own pilot’s license in 1955, just before going off to Ann Arbor to major in, guess what, Physics, not then a ‘normal’ option for a female. While at Michigan, she developed an ambition to be a NASA astronaut, and pursued that for a while, before she fell in love with a Jaguar XKE (“it was so beautiful,” she recalled) and racing it. Although she found it difficult to get sponsorships (it still is, for women drivers), she moved over into driving ‘real’ racing cars, where she did well enough to come to Rollo Vollstedt’s attention. Janet Guthrie went on to become the first woman to race in NASCAR’s Daytona 500 (and 32 other NASCAR events), and an articulate crusader for women’s rights in racing—and driving in Saudi Arabia. She’s still doing that, bless her, widowed (her husband was, you guessed it, a pilot) but unbowed at 86. ©.

[Stanley]

Edited by Maxwell Perkins

I am engaged in a kind of life and death struggle with Mr. Thomas Wolfe. Maxwell Perkins, 1934, turning down an invitation to holiday with Ernest Hemingway in Key West.

Maxwell (“Max”) Perkins (1884-1947) remains the most famous literary editor of the 20th century. He’s important because of the parts he played in discovering raw talent and then publishing it. In his years at Scribner’s, where he began (in 1910) producing advertising copy, Max Perkins edited the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Those three together would probably be enough for any editing career, but Perkins’ list included also a host of now lesser-known but still very solid writers, including Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Rawlings, James Jones, Alan Paton, and Vance Bourjaily. Perkins’s was a remarkable record, suggestive of some kind of genius (the recent film Genius stars Colin Firth as Perkins), but authors loved him precisely because he claimed no special gift. “At most,” he said, an editor “releases genius. He creates nothing.” And there’s no doubt that ‘his’ authors were an odd lot to edit. Consider Hemingway’s diamond-hard, spare, often monosyllabic prose in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the rambling, prolix luxury of Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929). How could these both be, in any sense, products of Maxwell Perkins’ “genius?” And yet Perkins calls his editing of Wolfe “a life and death struggle.” Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) had hawked his Angel manuscript around New York publishers for months before Perkins took it in, and Wolfe must have used a wheelbarrow. The Ms. contained 333,000 words, almost twice the length of my PhD thesis! So I know what wordiness is and I know the difficulties of stemming the tide. Most of the hard labor involved with cutting Angel down to 223,000 words involved Perkins sitting with Wolfe, face to face, and killing the author’s babies with a red pencil, sometimes whole pages. In 1934, Perkins again engaged with Wolfe, for days and weeks on end, in another “life and death struggle,” this time over Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. On the issue of length, the title is a warning in itself, but then consider Wolfe’s subtitle: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth and prepare yourself for an avalanche. The novel is autobiographical, and Wolfe remembered his own adolescence intensely. His first delivery to Perkins is said to have been two feet high. The whole Ms. contains over a million words. Another life and death struggle ensued, face to face, day to day, Sundays not excepted. It finally ended when, on March 8, 1935, Wolfe’s Of Time and the River was officially published with “only” 258,000 words. Don’t buy it for vacation reading, unless you plan to holiday in Key West. It’s a great place to do nothing else. ©.

[Stanley]

'Amazing Grace'.

My goal has always been to bring my people up to a level where they can make a choice . . . and to know what it is that they’re choosing. Graciela Gil Valero Olivárez.

The Kennecott Copper Mine, in Arizona, was not known for its progressive attitudes towards labor. To keep the workforce apart, it housed them in three ethnically distinctive towns, Ray for the ‘Whites,’ Sonora for the ‘Mexicans,’ and Barcelona for the ‘Spanish.’ These curious divisions lead me to assume that the ‘Mexicans’ were darker in complexion, more Meztiso, than the ‘Spanish.’ Whatever the case, Graciela Olivárez was born in Barcelona, AZ, on March 9, 1928. Graciela’s father kept his job despite the Great Depression, but her brother sought work in Phoenix. World War II’s employment boom brought the whole family to Phoenix, where in 1944 Graciela dropped out of school to take a job. She’d been a star student, and her bilingual skills got her a good position with the local Spanish language radio station, first as disc jockey. She grew out of that to host a woman’s program, and then grew further to host ‘Action Line,’ a phone-in program catering to the needs, and hearing the grievances, of Phoenix’s Hispanic poor. This brought Graciela to the attention of Yankee philanthropist Robert Choate and the Democratic Governor Sam Goddard, a Harvard grad originally from the posh suburb of Clayton, MO. She worked for Choate’s ‘Careers for Youth’ project, then Goddard appointed her to direct Arizona’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Her political career reached its high point when Jimmy Carter made her the highest-ranking Chicana in Washington. Meanwhile, her radical feminism put her at or near the crest of the ‘New Wave’ women’s lib movement as a cofounder (in 1966) of NOW, the National Organization for Women. After Carter’s defeat in 1980, Graciela moved back to the American southwest, where (in New Mexico and Arizona) her activism and philanthropy (and her return to ‘Action Line’ broadcasting) brought her the affectionate nickname “Amazing Grace.” She died, still at full steam, in 1989. But she was (in terms of the political conflicts of today) a bundle of contradictions. She’d also become, in 1970, the first female graduate of the Notre Dame law school despite her lack of normal qualifications (male gender, bachelor’s degree, etc.). She was a left-winger and women’s libber in politics, a successful entrepreneur in TV and radio, and an anti-abortionist. Goodness knows what we’d make of Graciela today—or she of us. But then the Kennecott Copper Mine hasn’t been consistent, either. It was sold, first, to Standard Oil, then to Rio Tinto Zinc, and lately RTZ sold off the Ray-Barcelona-Sonora mine to the Grupo México combine, a different sort of immigrant. In the USA, business, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. ©.

[Stanley]

The Iowa Jazz Hall of Fame

I’m gonna take you baby, we gonna move away from here. I don’t want no iceman, I’m gonna get me a Frigidaire. The Count Basie Orchestra’s 1942 version of “The Outskirts of Town.”

Of all the ‘associations’ that Iowa calls to my mind, jazz comes way down the list. Blues, too, even though one of my dad’s favorite 78s was Count Basie’s 1942 recording of “The Outskirts of Town.” Dad played it often when I was a small boy in Des Moines, and in his own youth he had played jazz trumpet when out of his mother’s ear shot. Then he went to Kansas City to begin a career in journalism, heard real horn players, and put his silver trumpet back in its blue velvet box. The treasures of YouTube include that Basie recording, a spinning red label on the screen and Jimmy Rushing on the vocals—clear as a bell. Dad particularly liked the lyrics. Still, I was surprised to learn that my home town now has a “Jazz Hall of Fame,” devoted to ‘Iowa jazz greats.’ Before you make any jokes about the hall being really far out of town, and in a very small building, remember Iowa’s own jazz great, Bix Beiderbecke, born Leon Bismark Beiderbecke on March 10, 1903, into a Davenport family unlikely to produce a jazz trumpeter. His father, Bismark Herman Beiderbecke, was a Prussian Protestant immigrant named after the great ‘Iron Chancellor’, Count Otto von Bismarck. Bismark Herman became prosperous coal merchant, married a riverboat captain’s daughter, and raised a small brood of Beiderbeckes, Leon the youngest. Mother (Agatha) played the organ in the Presbyterian church and taught piano to all three kids. Little Leon played standing up, reaching for the keys. So he learned to play by ear: probably not jazz. Then elder brother “Burnie” came back from the war against Germany with some jazz records. Leon Bismark, who’d taken his dad’s nickname of “Bix,” then sought out jazz on Davenport’s riverboats, including (legend has it) from Louis Armstrong. More certainly, Bix Beiderbecke joined a local quintet calling themselves the Black Jazz Babies. After some legal unpleasantness concerning sex and, probably, drink, Bix was sent to Chicago to school, a better place than Davenport to become a jazzman. Paulette and I, both Iowans to the core of our beings, did not learn about him until we moved to England, through The Beiderbecke Trilogy a 1980s ITV whodunit in which a feckless night school teacher with a Beiderbecke fixation falls into the habit of getting involved in local scandals of dark and dangerous nature. The drama was excellent (the playwright was Alan Plater) and a prizewinner, but the soundtrack was finer. It won prizes on its own, and it was, of course, made up of Beiderbecke classics. It reminded me of dad, and of Jimmy Rushing promising to move his baby to the outskirts, where she wouldn’t need no iceman. ©

[Tripps]

Bells ringing all over the place here. . . .

I saw the Count Basie Orchestra live at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, and heard Jimmy Rushing (Mr Five by Five) sing. Frankly I found it all a bit boring - especially the longest drum solo ever, during which the entire orchestra left and then returned to the stage. Much preferred Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band.

I also think that The Beiderbecke Trilogy is the best thing that has ever been on TV. That's quite a statement, but I once heard that view shared by Jimmy Greaves the Tottenham footballer in an interview. Shrewd judge. . .

I have the video tape the CD, an audio tape of the music, and and the book. I still descibe some situations as 'a bit Beiderbecke'. I don't think 'feckless' is the right word at all to describe Trevor Chaplin.

Trevor is a middle-aged woodwork teacher. Unruffled and amiable, Trevor drifts through life with few ambitions or principles.

If that's feckless then I'm pleading guilty.

The Beiderbecke Affair

[Stanley]

I have no interest in Jazz but found the Beiderbecke Affair riveting! I don't think I missed a single episode.

[Stanley]

One lump, or two?

Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth. Alexander Pushkin.

The Unitarian Chapel in Chorley, Lancashire is a pioneer of the Unitarian movement. It’s old enough to have served in 1745 as quarters for Prince Charlie’s men on their ill-fated march towards London, but the Pretender slept elsewhere. God knows what Charlie made of Unitarianism (if anything), but the chapel itself was too simple to house the heir of the Stuarts. From one side it’s a barn. The other side’s gothic windows reveal its purpose, consistently advanced since it was completed in 1728. Of its 19 ministers, the one with the longest tenure (1799-1836) was William Tate, who improved his stipend by using the chapel as a school: a prudent strategy, for the reverend and his lady also taught a dozen children of their own. Unitarian-like, they settled them in good trades or in good marriages. After schooling their youngest they apprenticed him to his elder brother Caleb, a grocer in Liverpool. That youngest son was Henry Tate, born on March 11, 1819. Henry Tate became a great grocer (with six retail shops and a wholesale market). But then, 1859, Henry decided to go into sugar refining, at which he proved a genius. We should not blame Henry Tate for giving the British their fatal sweet tooth (when he started in, Brits were already buying brown sugar by the loaf), but his firm perfected the way to refine sugar into granulated crystals, pure and white, then sell it by weight. Still unsatisfied, Tate made sugar into cubes so that Victorians (indeed, Victoria herself) could drop each cube discretely into their tea. Henry Tate didn’t invent white, granulated sugar, nor a way to convert it to cubes, but he was an entrepreneur at heart. When he saw a promising patent, he bought it. He paid good money for his first sugar cube patent, in 1874, and then £12,000 for an even better one in 1892 (that would be about £2 million in 2024). He lived quietly, even modestly for a man of wealth, refusing a baronetcy until Victoria insisted that he take one. He remembered the Chorley Unitarians by giving them a library (and some books to put into it), but that was one of the smallest of his benefactions. In today’s values, he gave millions to London University (for a women’s college), to Oxford (for Manchester College, a dissenters’ haven), and to Liverpool. But we remember him today for endowing the National Gallery of British Art (and giving many paintings to put in it). Sir Henry didn’t want his name on it, but today we call it ‘the Tate,’ and its progeny too, including (of course) the Tate Liverpool, but also the Tate Modern and the Tate St. Ives. Visit them when you can, and take tea with two sugars while you’re at each. ©

[Stanley]

a home-town poet.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Famous,” 1995.

Let us now praise famous women, for the woman in question, Naomi Shihab Nye, is a home town girl, born in St. Louis, MO, on March 12, 1952. She moved to San Antonio when she was fourteen, and now calls that place her home town, because she likes the rhyme and rhythm and sound of her neighbors’ talk, in Spanish, the language they use at home in their home town. She also thinks that everyone should have a home town, a place they can call their own. Her mother, Miriam Allwardt, was a St. Louis girl who lived at 3401 Union Blvd. before she won a scholarship to Washington University, over on the posher side of the city. There Miriam studied art under Max Beckmann, an exile from Hitler who’d made a new home in St. Louis. She became a painter herself, taught in a Montessori school. Then Miriam married Aziz Shihab, a writer who’d lost his own home town, Jerusalem, in the Hakba of 1948. It’s thus not wholly surprising that their daughter, Naomi, was writing poetry at age 6, a time when, she remembers, her father seemed rather shell-shocked. I’ve not seen any of those first poems, don’t even know if they still exist, but many of her published poems deal with displacement. After graduating from Robert E. Lee High School (since renamed!!!) in San Antonio, the young poet studied literature at Trinity (her home town university in San Antonio), and began to publish in 1980, a volume whose title poem is “Different Ways to Pray.” So she was concerned with the fate of her father’s people (she met them, near Ramallah, when in her teens and still visits occasi onally). A quick review of her published work (on poetry websites) includes poems referent to the Palestinian issue, but you’d be wrong to see them as “political.” In San Antonio, Naomi married a local lawyer, Michael Nye, who’s since left the profession to become a crusader of sorts (mainly on local issues). Naomi herself still publishes prizewinning poetry, mainly for adults, but she’s also moved into children’s poetry. She’s won prizes there, too. For adults or children, she returns again and again to the theme of diversity and its wonders. I suspect book banners are thinking of her. Luckily, so are judges. Her poem “Famous” was cited in full by Circuit Judge Andre Davis in his opinion in G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board (2016), a gender-preference “bathroom” case. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn Davis’s ruling, the school board settled out of court in 2021, paying out a cool $1.3 million for punishing G.G.’s diversities. I imagine that the poet was pleased. ©.

[Stanley]

Who's an "ethnic," then?

The only reason for mastering technique is to make sure the body does not prevent the soul from expressing itself. La Meri.

Once upon an autumn, on an outing in the Lake District, a new student in Lancaster’s MA in Social History stopped the bus and ran back to the town center (in Whitehaven) because, he said, he wanted to buy “ethnic meat.” He never lived it down. His “ethnic meat” was our Cumberland sausage, ubiquitous, and every butcher from Lancaster to the Scottish border had their own recipe for it. For this student (from London), the “ethnic” was somebody else, or somewhere else, and he obviously thought he’d traveled beyond the jumping-off place. Our idea of ‘ethnic dance’ is similar: a dance performed by someone else from somewhere else to strange music, and usually in ‘folk’ costume. Goodness knows what they thought of the minuet in Timbuctoo. That we are today much more familiar with the notion of ‘ethnic dance’ than were, say, the inhabitants of old Timbuctoo is the singular accomplishment of a woman who went by the name of La Meri. She was born in Lexington, KY, on March 13, 1899, and christened Russell Meriwether Hughes, Jr., after her father. Whatever her parents’ motive in that, they wanted their daughter educated in the arts, and from the age of four, when the family moved to San Antonio, young Russell acquired many talents, beginning with the piano and the violin. By the time she’d reached high school, she’d added song, poetry, and painting and (of course) dance: ‘ballet’ in San Antonio. She performed professionally first in San Antonio movie houses, in the intervals between features, or between reels we might say. But by the time she’d moved to New York (to study ballet), she’d also studied, absorbed, and begun to perform ‘ethnic’ dance(s). Mexican and Spanish first, perhaps under the guidance of her husband Guido Carreras, but as she toured the world (really just about everywhere) she learned, and performed, the ‘ethnic’ dances of Polynesia, India, North Africa, China, even Europe (where ‘ethnic’ had found its place as ‘folk’). La Meri (a professional name she acquired in Mexico) was student and performing artist, of course, but she was also scholar and teacher, and it must be said entrepreneur and evangelist of dance as an eclectic art form. She did all sorts of dance, but was particularly known (along with Ruth St. Denis and Ram Gopal) for marrying classical Hindu with (European) ballet in single (and singular) performances. After her first retirement, in 1960, to Cape Cod, she continued to teach, write, and perform at the Jacob’s Pillow dance center. It is ironic that our new multiculturalism has made her into an epitome of ‘whiteness’; but I think she would have been amused by my “ethnic meat” story. ©

[Stanley]

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise. Motto above the door of Shakespeare & Co., a bookshop in Paris.

The internet, so-called, contains enough information to cheapen “knowledge.” It can also be gloriously arbitrary. This morning, a small typo led me to two places called “Sylvan Beach,” one in Texas, the other in New York. By name they must be restful sites, and near enough to water to have a beach and a couple of trees. Both feature ‘destination weddings,’ whatever those are, and Sylvan Beach, TX, even has a gallery, the Crow’s Nest, featuring Native American jewelry. But I wanted Sylvia Beach, born in Baltimore on March 14, 1887, and christened Nancy after her maternal grandmother. Nancy later changed to “Sylvia,” possibly in honor of her father Sylvester, a Presbyterian minister who, in 1901, became assistant minister at the American Church in Paris. In 1906, the family returned to the USA where Sylvester took over at the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, NJ, a very posh pulpit. But their teen-aged daughter had been bitten by the Paris bug, enough to change her name and then to return to Paris on the eve of the Great War, to do research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. She found a home at a smaller library, a lending library and bookstore, in the rue de l’Odéon, with the attracting name of La Maison des Amis des Livres. Indeed it was; it lent books, sold them, and held readings by the likes of André Gide. Sylvia was so taken by the idea that she stayed to became the partner and lover of Adrienne Monnier, who ran the place, then to move a little down the street (at No. 8) where in 1919 Sylvia founded Shakespeare & Co., a brilliant name for a lending library, book store, and salon that catered to Anglophone Parisians—of whom, by 1919, there were quite a few. Some of these were down enough to need a place to sleep, so they did that, too, at Shakespeare & Co., and they talked and read from their own or others’ works. Their names evoke a fly-on-the-wall fever; one would have liked to be there to see, maybe to hear, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Eliot, or for that matter Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein (she who called all the rest of them a ‘lost generation’). Sylvia even went into publishing, notably Joyce’s Ulysses, a banned book. Sylvia’s career ended when Hitler strutted down the Champs Elysées, but later Woody Allen would play with my fly-on-the-wall fantasy with Midnight in Paris (2011). Even before that (in 1951) another odd American, George Whitman, would recreate Shakespeare & Co. in the rue de la Bûcherie. I’ve been there, and would go again. It’s not too far from Sylvia Beach’s original and still hosts readings. But the American Church is quite a long walk, and Sylvan Beach, TX, is worlds away. ©

[Stanley]

Farming science and rural politics.

Extension work is not exhortation . . . exploitation . . . [or] advertising. It is a plain, earnest, and continuous effort to meet the needs of the people on their own farms and in their own localities. Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr.

George Platt Brett, Sr. (1858-1936) was a giant of American publishing, best known today as the patron and publisher of Jane Addams, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. London-born, Brett saw these radicals (and others of their ilk) as emblematic of the USA. On the business side, meanwhile, Brett was the genius who established Macmillan New York as an autonomous entity within the Macmillan empire, with its own offices, its own publishing policies, and its own legal identity as a corporation registered in the state of New York. Brett and his son ruled Macmillan USA from 1898 into the 1950s. This very American publisher was also an enthusiastic botanist. He made his Connecticut estate into a “pinetum” (an arboretum for pine varieties) and, later, planted a tropical and subtropical garden at his winter home in Florida. Brett was an amateur botanist, but he had the best possible advice, for he was also the patron, publisher, and friend of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr., a professional botanist of the pioneering sort. In this Bailey Jr. took after his father, a Johnny Appleseed type who’d walkedfrom Vermont to Michigan carrying scores of apple seedlings. Bailey Sr. planted them on his new farm at South Haven, MI, where, on March 15, 1858, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr., was born. Inevitably (?), Bailey, Jr., studied botany at Michigan Agricultural College (a land-grant institution now Michigan State) and graduated 1882. He did well enough at MAC to go on to Harvard, where he did well enough to be appointed Asa Gray’s assistant at the Harvard Herbarium. Liberty Hyde Bailey then returned to MAC as founding professor of horticulture before moving on to Cornell, in Ithaca, NY, in 1888. There he continued his chosen mission of cataloguing every “cultivar” (a word he coined) of North American agriculture, including (one supposes) apples. Bailey became dean of Cornell’s College of Agriculture, chief missionary of Cornell’s “extension movement” and the prophet of the family farm as the best and enduring basis of a vigorous rural culture. Bailey would preserve the family farm by injecting it with the best scientific knowledge, but also through political action. He was a scientist who, besides rediscovering the genetic genius of Gregor Mendel, favored rural sociology and agrarian politics. Bailey urged farmers to welcome new ideas, new plants, and new people as vital elements in their struggle to preserve what was best in the rural way of life. So it was that George Brett could move so easily from publishing the realist fiction of Jack London to publishing the rural science of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr. ©.

[Stanley]

The capital costs of press freedom.

We deem it expedient to establish a paper and bring into operation all the means with which our benevolent creator has endowed us, for the moral, religious, civil and literary improvement of our race. Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, ca. March 16, 1829.

Freedom of the press is among the most valuable of our rights, but as my father often reminded his journalism classes at Drake University, it was an expensive right. Readers might benefit by choosing which journal to read, but if there was only one paper in town (as was the case in Des Moines) their freedom of choice was lost in its use. And Gardner Cowles (whose family owned the Des Moines Register and Tribune, and KRNT radio and television) owned way more press freedom than any of his readers could afford. There were hopes that the internet (aka the ‘World Wide Web’) might open things up, and it did, but with the mixed results that come from confusing freedom with license. And there is talk, especially among conservatives, that it would be an idea full of profit-taking potential, to enclose the web with tollgates. Because the freedom of the press was limited to those who could afford it, a small group of activists in New York pooled their assets to found The Freeman’s Journal, and its first issue hit the streets of lower Manhattan on March 16, 1827. It had a short life, not an entirely happy one, but it was the first black newspaper in the USA, and thus the ancestor of a varied and vigorous progeny. Its aims were to provide a voice for a hitherto silent community, New York’s blacks both free and enslaved, and to raise up a black readership too. In its short life it did more than that, circulating to paid subscribers in eleven states and employing more than eleven subscription agents. The project drew together the leaders of a growing black community and employed the considerable talents of two black editors, Samuel Cornish (1795-1858) and John Russwurm (1799-1851), and, working together, they all battled against the racism of the city’s established papers, relaying positive news of black achievements and (were any needed) of the terrible injustices of racial slavery (in the South) and of racial exclusion (in the North). But the freedom to publish is a liberating force in itself, and almost immediately the backers and the editors of the Freeman’s Journal began to fall apart amongst themselves. They disagreed on the tactics and strategy of liberation (some very radical and others not so), and even more bitterly on the goals of their quest for equality. Russwurm and Cornish, for instance, soon fell out over whether, or not, free blacks should press for colonization (freedom and equality in an African homeland). Riven by internal discord and (as always) working against the realities of black poverty and the costs of press freedom, the Freeman’s Journal folded in 1830. ©.

[Stanley]

A woman's work.

I was born liberated. Alice Greenough Orr, bronco buster and rodeo entrepreneur.

The seven Greenough kids, of Red Lodge, Montana, were rawhide-tough. Several of them lived well into their 90s, a tribute (perhaps) to their parents who had treated them all as equals, boys and girls. Certainly all worked on the family’s ranch, broke and trained horses, punched cattle, and when leisure time arose, participated in family and ‘neighborhood’ rodeos. Four of them would become famous rodeo professionals, known as the “Riding Greenoughs,” and of these the two most famous were the sisters Margie (1908-2004) and Alice Greenough (1902-1995). Margie outlived them all, but Alice Greenough was the most successful. She was born on the ranch on March 17, 1902. In her teens she became known as an intrepid mail carrier, on horseback of course, riding her USPS rounds (like the motto says) through snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night. She then joined the rodeo circuit, not as hard as you might think for a woman for, after all, Alice had role models to follow like little Annie Oakley, never mind her brother, ‘Turk’ Greenough (1905-1995). With or without Margie and Turk, Alice performed almost everywhere, including London (where she took tea with Queen Mary). In Melbourne, Australia, she won the women’s buck-jumping title---twice!! All good things, however, must come to an end, and the end seemed to come when (in World-War-II-time) the gods that ruled rodeos decided that such shenanigans were not appropriate activities for the weaker sex. They meant women, of course. But instead of hanging up her spurs and coiling her rope, Alice Greenough teamed up with an old rodeo friend, Joe Orr, to establish the Greenough-Orr Rodeo, a professional troupe that toured the USA and Canada. The Greenough-Orr combine made its own rules and, unsurprisingly, found a place for women, but Alice (now in her 40s and 50s) restricted herself to exhibition riding (generally of broncos) rather than contests. Along the way she’d done just about everything, including bull-riding and (as dangerously) playing the clown to attract the bulls away from fallen riders. She even had a spell in Hollywood as a stunt double. Alice was last seen on horseback in 1992, sedately leading a parade back home on the range in Red Lodge, where she died in 1995. By then, she’d been inducted into several halls of fame which had to do with our nostalgia for the old west: first, in 1975, she joined the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. The Rodeo Hall of Fame, next, was a no-brainer. But then Alice Greenough Orr (she married Joe in 1958) was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame. As far as I know, Ron DeSantis hasn’t objected, as confusing as this might seem to our impressionable children. ©.