BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? John Ball, at Blackheath, June 12, 1381.

St. Louis’s Brentwood neighborhood oddly and I suspect unconsciously memorializes the town (in Essex, England) where in late May 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt began, when very ordinary folk gathered to protest a debt proceeding and instead killed the jurymen and three court officials, and sent the judge scurrying back to London. It seemed such a good idea to the suffering poor that the revolt spread like wildfire into many parts of England, emptying the prisons, suspending “justice,” and climaxing in June with a march on London which included a successful invasion of the Tower, the killing of the Lord Chancellor and several other high officials, and an apparently successful negotiation with the king himself, the young Richard II. The “poor” in the revolt were indeed many-headed, but the mob did throw up leaders, including Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. The king’s forces soon regrouped, suppressed the revolt (in London and elsewhere), recanted all the agreements made with the rebels (by the king and others) and visited a bloody revenge on the leaders (and many followers). It was, nevertheless, a memorable event, and one reason for the memory was an open-air sermon preached on June 12, 1381, at Blackheath, by John Ball, a former priest already excommunicated for his inflammatory sermons. He’d kept on preaching a Christian equality, however, had been cast in jail, and indeed was one of those released from prison by the mob. No one recorded his Blackheath sermon, of course, but many heard it, and it has entered cultural memory as an eloquent attack on the senseless cruelties and indefensible inequalities that society inflicts on those it chooses to call “the poor,” and on their children. For his words, and his actions, John Ball was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and parts of his body were put on display to help reimpose the King’s peace and the King’s majesty in several parts of the realm. ©

[Stanley]

As women . . . it is our duty to make articulate our convictions. Chrystal Macmillan et al, the Manifesto of the International Congress of Women, The Hague, 1915.

English is more gender-free than many languages. In French, even the simple “some” is gender-afflicted (“de la” versus “du”). This may be a sublingual reason for France’s delay in achieving female suffrage (women couldn’t vote in La République until 1945), but in English we still look for a gender-free singular pronoun (“their” meanwhile doing yeowoman service). But what of the word “persons”? This became an issue in the Scottish suffrage debate as soon as the universities began (very late 19th century) to graduate women, for under an 1868 law each Scottish university had special representation, the constituency being the “persons” who had degrees from Edinburgh, Glasgow, or St. Andrews. Surely, it was argued (in 1908), “persons” included women. But in a masculine bray, the Scottish high court opined that “persons” meant men only and thus it would always be. The woman who argued that case in court was not yet a lawyer (she couldn’t be), although as soon as law allowed she became one. She was the formidable Chrystal Macmillan, born on June 13, 1872 into a wealthy Edinburgh family. An only daughter, she was educated at home and in school, then (brilliantly) at the universities of Edinburgh and Berlin. Along the way (probably having eight brothers helped) Macmillan acquired a passion for female equality, not just the vote but in every aspect of life, including equal civil rights for prostitutes. She was a leader in the British suffrage campaign, but equality’s wider remit drove her efforts to open employment opportunities for women and to remove those legal ‘protections’ that kept them in second-class safety and in second-class status. A committed internationalist, Jessie Macmillan also—courageously—took the pacifist cause abroad to war-torn Europe in WWI, and then to the USA. Her name lives on in the Chrystal Macmillan prize, given annually by the (English) Middle Temple to the woman scoring the highest in the bar examinations, and in the Chrystal Macmillan Building at the University of Edinburgh. ©

[Stanley]

A healthy optimism that cheerfully searches for new ways to understand . . . Alois Alzheimer's prescription for those who would be scientists.

Life expectancy is one measure of social health, and our president might reflect that our northern neighbor (whose young premier he calls weak and vacillating) long since surpassed us in this statistic. Canada is in this category in the world’s first rank (along with, e.g. Japan and the whole of western Europe. In this vital statistic, the USA has fallen into the second rank, along with Iran, Viet Nam, Cuba, and Algeria. In 19th-century Germany, when Alois Alzheimer was born (on June 14, 1864) life expectancy for men was about 45 years, and so he didn’t do too badly, succumbing in 1915 to complications of a streptococcal infection. His wife Cecilia had predeceased him by 14 years. So when as a physician Alzheimer began to study senile dementia (in 1895, at Heidelberg, with his senior colleague Emil Kraepelin) he was wont to call it “premature,” and indeed the woman patient whose illness and death helped Alzheimer to his first full diagnosis—Auguste Deter—was “only” (as we would say today) 51 when he first encountered her, in 1901, and not at all senile though already beginning to act like she was. It was a measure of medical economics and politics that Auguste’s family wanted her to move to cheaper care facility, palliative rather than diagnostic, but so classical did her symptoms seem that Alzheimer maneuvered successfully to keep her in his bailiwick. When Auguste died (1906) Alzheimer did a post-mortem—on her brain, where he knew the problem lay—and noted shrinkage (notably in the cortex) and a veritable jungle of neural tangles and plaques. Promoted to a professorship at Breslau (today, Wroclaw), Alzheimer continue to work on the problem, but it was his colleague Kraepelin who insisted that Auguste Deter’s malady should be called Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s death, soon after, left that as a grim memorial to a man generally remembered as kindly, eccentric, modest, and charmingly myopic. ©

[Stanley]

And there they launched in solid time // The first attack on Right Divine-- Rudyard Kipling, The Reeds of Runnymede, 1922.

Back in the days of romance and racism, there was a contest over where one might find liberty’s roots, roots from which grew the mighty oak of Anglo-American freedom, law, and constitutionalism. Some thought to find the source in the folkmeets of the Teutonic forests. During the diplomatic rapprochement between the UK and the USA, circa 1885-1917, attention shifted to turning points in English (not Scots or Welsh) history, and a favored runner was the Magna Carta, wherein Bad King John was brought to his senses by a band of liberty-loving brothers. His “Great Charter” marked the beginning of a steady progress, an ascent really, towards the heavenly uplands of our present happy situation. It was memorably celebrated (in 1922) in Rudyard Kipling’s “Reeds of Runnymede,” those

Lissom reeds that give and take,

That bend so far, but never break

And indeed those river reeds witnessed, on June 15, 1215, the signing of the Magna Carta Libertatum (“the Great Charter of the Liberties”), at Runnymede, a Thameside meadow downstream from Windsor Castle that was once a meeting place for the Saxons. The document, drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, only delayed war between the King and his Barons (not very many of whom spoke English), for soon both sides trashed Magna Carta, each hoping for better things (that is, supremacy), and the great charter is now felt by scholars to be more of a fizzle than a foundation. Nevertheless, English and American lawyers love the place, and erected (in 1929 and 1957, respectively) its largest memorials. The memorials tell us that liberty started here, and doubtless they mean it sincerely, but we should remember that most lawyers’ fees derive from disputes over broken contracts. ©

[Tripps]

Looks like Tony Hancock might have had a point. Magna Carta

[Stanley]

Indeed.....

[Stanley]

Baltimore, in Maryland. Printed by Mary Katherine Goddard. Publisher's note on the 'Goddard Broadside' of the Declaration of Independence, January 18, 1777.

In her recent prizewinner, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Danielle Allen stresses the document’s ‘coda,’ wherein the signers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. It’s right that Allen should do so. Declaring independence made the founders (as George III declared) international outlaws (“terrorists” was not yet in use). Yet it’s worth noting that the first printed copies of the Declaration—spreading rapidly up and down the seaboard—did not have the signatures. Those came in the “Goddard Broadside,” January, 1777, so-called because it was issued by (and the type almost certainly set by) Mary Katherine Goddard, at that time editor, publisher, typesetter, and general factotum of Baltimore’s first newspaper, The Maryland Journal. Born in Connecticut on June 16, 1738, the formidable Miss Goddard was raised in a family stained with printer’s ink. Her brother William had founded the Providence (RI) Gazette, and Mary, her sister Sarah, and her widowed mother (also Sarah) learned the trade (which included stationery, ink, and bookbinding) from the bottom up. So the Stamp Act affected them directly, and along with many colonists they added “unjustly” to that, becoming ardent “whigs,” in the language of the time. By the time of the independence crisis they’d established themselves in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and Mary Katherine (besides publishing the Baltimore paper and running its commercial shop) was in 1775 appointed postmaster there, by old Ben Franklin and (behind him) that upstart and usurping Continental Congress. The new government of 1789 dismissed Mary Katherine Goddard because she was a woman (and therefore couldn’t travel), but why was she appointed in the first place? Perhaps it was because, as Danielle Allen argues so convincingly, that self-evident truth about equality proclaimed in “our declaration” really did embrace more than just “men.” ©

[Stanley]

I got this from Bob this morning.....

You will be receiving this because you are on my “anniversary note” mailing list. I have been doing these notes for 18 years, daily since September 2012, and—despite a disastrous computer crash in 2007) have something like 5,500 of them. That total probably includes about 100 duplicates, but because I like new factoids I don’t like to repeat unless I have something new to say about the person or event whose anniversary it might be.



Several faithful readers have, over the years, suggested subjects, and I write to invite others to do the same. I can’t promise to honor your suggestion(s), but I will consider each one. There are no requirements, but please do remember that these go out (also) as birthday notes to Honors College students whose personal anniversary it might be. So I don’t do villains or disasters. In my choice of subjects, I also try to honor the student body’s diversities, not only of ethnicity, but also of gender, national origin, and intellectual interest. The honors college is a living, breathing rainbow coalition, and these notes need over each year to reflect that.



Thanks in advance for whatever suggestion(s) you might have. Don’t worry about ‘duplicates’! My filing system—such as it is—will weed those out.



Cheers, and happy anniversary!! (it must be somebody’s).



Bob Bliss

His email is rmbliss@umsl.edu

[Stanley]

Do not try to put us down, but help us to climb higher. Give us a chance. Susan La Flesche, 1885, Valedictory Address, Hampton Institute

Evidence of the race tolerance of the Omaha nation was that their chief from 1853, Iron Eye, was not Omaha at all, but of Ponca and French Canadian ancestry. His wife, One Woman, was the daughter of a US Army surgeon and his Iowa-Otoe-Omaha “post wife.” One Woman, aka Mary Gale, became militantly Omaha, but Iron Eye, aka Joseph La Flesche, raised their five children on an assimilationist model, encouraged by President Grant’s “Peace Policy” and its (mainly) Presbyterian supporters. His daughter Susan La Flesche, born on the Nebraska reservation on June 17, 1865, was particularly successful. Top of her class at the reservation’s mission school, she then was top of her class at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and in 1889 she graduated valedictorian from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Strongly identifying as Omaha, Susan thus became the first native American woman to be licensed as a physician. She was also, incidentally, the first student of any ‘race’ to receive her graduate education by federal government grant. Susan La Flesche returned to the reservation in northeast Nebraska where she became the mission school’s health officer, its hygiene and health instructor, and the reservation’s sole doctor. She also married (1894) a Sioux, Henry Picotte, and birthed and raised two children (and after Picotte’s death secured their inheritance in battles with Sioux reservation officials). Imbued with the ethos of her early education, Susan LaFlesche Picotte not only provided professional medical care (and later oversaw the construction of a small hospital) but urged on her pupils and her patients a fully assimilationist way of life, not only Presbyterian but also Prohibitionist. Typically of her own inheritance, she cared also for non-Indian patients in an area where trained doctors of any gender or ethnicity were thin on the ground. Dr. Picotte died young, aged only 50, some said of overwork. ©

[Stanley]

I worked up a daily fury about some economic injustice because there were so many of them. Sylvia Porter.

One way for a woman to get ahead was to conceal her gender. One (of many) examples of this was S. F. Porter, a financial analyst who established a sterling reputation, in the dark days of the Great Depression, advising on (and investing in) the market, especially in government and municipal bonds. Before the outbreak of WWII, S. F. Porter was a nationally syndicated columnist, editor, the author of two best-selling books (one on bonds, the other, in 1941, on civil defense), and an eminent critic of some New Deal financial policies. At which point her publisher came clean and decided to introduce her to the world as Sylvia Porter, not a white-haired, pin-striped financial wizard but a young (she was by then only 29!!) financial witch. Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, quickly sent her a bouquet of roses. It is not recorded how “Miss Porter” took this, for she was really Mrs. Porter, the wife of banker Reed Porter. Sylvia Porter was born Sylvia Feldman on June 18, 1913. Her dad was a doctor, her mother a successful milliner who invested $30,000 in the 1920s boom market. When boom went bust, Sylvia (then an English literature major at Hunter College) switched to economics, graduated magna cum laude, married a banker, and found a Wall Street job as an “assistant” in an investment firm. In 1934 “S. F. Porter” began to write an in-house newsletter, which proved so insightful that it soon became a column for the New York Post. Then she, still “S. F. Porter,” was named as the Post’s financial editor. In her long career—once she “came out” as a woman—Sylvia Porter advised many (40 million, by one count), including several presidents, and made the cover of Time magazine in 1960. Despite her criticism of Morgenthau, she was “liberal” in her views and loyalties and, among other things, is known for helping Lyndon Johnson to pick the first African-American (Andrew Brimmer) to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. ©

[Stanley]

We find out that different conditions have made different classes of people, and that conditions can be changed. An adult student summarizing her curriculum at the Bryn Mawr Summer School, 1931.

One of the pioneers in the extension of higher education to the working class was Hilda Worthington Smith (aka “Jane”), born in New York City on June 19, 1888. She was the eldest of three children in a wealthy family (industry and law), and an unlikely candidate for a life in social reform. But her parents had been raised to believe that the world should be made into a better place. Jane’s maternal grandfather, for instance, divided his time between railroad management and running the seaman’s mission at St. Timothy’s Church. And so all three children’s playtime included creating an imaginary world, described in Jane’s 1934 memoir “A Post Office in Fairyland.” Her sister, Helen Hall Smith, sickly as a child, spent the whole of her long adult life caring for the sickly children of the poor. As for “Jane” Smith, her volunteer work was not interrupted when her mother required her to enter Bryn Mawr College, for as well as excelling academically (BA and MA, Philosophy) she agitated for female suffrage and organized a couple of charitable societies while, at home, starting ed and higher ed classes for black domestic workers. She returned to Bryn Mawr as residential warden, with a remit to begin a program in workers’ education. Here a long European trip had inspired her with a larger vision, based on Britain’s Workers’ Educational Association, and so what may have begun as a charitable sideline for a well-bred young woman (who was also, by the way, an accomplished poet) became a working life and a new institution, or rather a series of institutions, starting with the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers (1921) and continuing on through several other schools, some residential, in Pennsylvania and New York, and then (recruited by Harry Hopkins) several years in prominent New Deal roles. Once started, Hilda Jane Worthington Smith could not stop. Her career in public service ended only with her death, at age 95, in 1984. ©

[Stanley]

The well-taught philosophical mind// To all compassion gives;// Casts round the world an equal eye,// And feels for all that lives. Anna Letitia Barbauld.

Modern feminism has been a liberating force, not only for contemporary women. It has liberated the dead, women whose literary, scientific, or artistic talents shine again after being tarnished, or hidden away, by an intervening ‘cult of domesticity.’ Among these reborn heroines is Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld, born in Leicestershire on June 20, 1743. Educated at home by her parents, the Rev’d John Aiken and his wife Jane, Anna Letitia entered enthusiastically into her father’s main work, teaching (and leading) various dissenting academies in the Midlands and Lancashire. Anna—having learned to read at two—taught infants, thus becoming a pioneer of “preschool.” But before she married (at the advanced age of 34), she’d also become an admired poet and essayist, her work (one critic wrote) “inferior only to . . . Milton and Shakespeare.” She was also a handsome woman, and family legend had it that before she married the Rev. Mr. Barbauld she was courted by one of her father’s staff, a French instructor by the name of Jean-Paul Marat. That would have been an interesting match, and not at all beyond Anna Letitia’s talents or sympathies, for she was a close friend of such radicals as the scientist Joseph Priestley (and his wife) and the Godwins. She later wrote in defense of the French Revolution and against the reactionary tide that helped sustain Britain’s role in the world wars of 1793-1815. Believing her country to be badly in need of satire, Anna Barbauld brought out a new edition of Addison and Steele (1804) and wrote an epic protest poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), which earned her a good deal of obloquy from the tory press but is now seen as an important Romantic Era work. And she went on teaching, including a spell with the very young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who admired her once but lived long enough to turn against her as a merely didactic woman. He was, apparently, mistaken. ©

[Stanley]

Coincidences are the puns of destiny. Arthur Koestler.

One reward of these anniversary notes is to find the odd and often utterly fortuitous interconnections of life. Take for instance the birth anniversary of the astronomer Max Wolf, born in Heidelberg on June 21, 1863 and destined to become professor of astronomy and director of Heidelberg University’s observatory. Wolf developed sophisticated techniques of astrophotography to spot, and then study, asteroids, comets, and dark nebulae. Oddly, he named the first (of hundreds) of his asteroid discoveries 323 Brucia (discovered in 1891), after an American, Catherine Wolfe Bruce, whom he had met in the previous year when both were “privat docent” appointments (unpaid official teachers) at Heidelberg. Catherine, an accomplished scholar, tutored in modern literatures (and in Latin), and while the two obviously hit it off there is no evidence of a romantic attachment between Catherine, in 1890 a rather remarkable spinster of 74 summers and the young Wolf (aged 27 and soon to marry). But Ms. Bruce introduced Dr. Wolf to her connections to the Bruce-Lorillard-Wolfe families in New York City, a fascinating cousinage whose fortunes were based on publishing, tobacco, and the law and who were already involved in large philanthropies. Catherine’s cousin (another remarkable spinster, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe) had been especially active, and when she died (in 1887, aged 59) she transferred much of her (huge) fortune to her Wolfe cousins, which enabled Catherine Wolfe Bruce (in due course, in 1900-1902) to donate a state of the art telescope and camera to Professor Wolf’s work at Heidelberg (and similar stuff to the observatories at Harvard and Yale) Today the Heidelberg equipage is still in use, asteroid 323 Brucia still circles the sun, the Bruce crater still reflects light and shadow from the moon’s surface, and each year a major astronomical prize (the Bruce Prize) reminds us that good things can arise from chance meetings between kindred spirits. ©

[Stanley]

Do not wish me happiness. I don't expect to be happy. . . . Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor. I will need them all. Anne Morrow, 1928, to a friend on her engagement.

Donald Trump’s racist definition of Americanism and his sloganeering about “America first” has led some to compare him to Charles Lindbergh. But it’s a deeply flawed comparison, telling us only that both genuine heroes and bone-spurred draft dodgers are fully capable of delusional thinking. But it is just as well that no one (as yet) has attempted to bring Lindbergh’s wife into the picture, perhaps because she was so obviously incomparable to both men. Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born on June 22, 1906, her father a Republican senator, her mother an eminent educator, sometime president of Smith College. In 1927, Anne (a senior at Smith) fell in love with Lindbergh in Mexico City, where her father was US ambassador, Lindbergh on a hero’s tour. They married two years later, and shared equally in an exciting life of aviation, exploration, and commercial development, and then tragedy in the kidnapping and murder of their first child. From all this Anne Morrow Lindbergh emerged as a remarkably strong, complex character. Not only did she learn to fly (solo and in tandem), but she learned also to love others (a French war hero and a Presbyterian minister), yet to stay with Charles and their other children. She’s most famed for her understanding the conflicting demands placed on her by her desire to be a woman, wife, mother, and working author (in Gift from the Sea, 1955) . In 1973, the publication of Anne’s letters and diaries (Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead) enabled Alfred Kazin to appreciate the complicated role that both Lindberghs played in 20th-century America and to see in Anne’s writing not only a “lyricism of action” but also a “bitterness that was all the deeper for [her] well-bred inability to express it.” Just so, Alfred’s son, the historian Michael Kazin, early (summer, 2016) nailed the inaccuracies, absurdities, and dangers of seeing Donald Trump as a new edition of Charles Lindbergh. ©

[Stanley]

If you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Wilma Rudolph.

Some people should be as famous for the disadvantages they faced as for their successes, and among these rarities we find Wilma Glodean Rudolph. She was a premature baby, born weak and light in the unincorporated neighborhood called St. Bethlehem, in Tennessee, on June 23, 1940. Her family was poor, and it was very large (she was the 20th of her father’s 22 children). Frail at birth, she was subjected to severe childhood illnesses, including scarlet fever and pneumonia, and in grade school required a leg brace to walk. And in segregated America, she was black. What hope could there be? But just 50 miles away there was an all-black medical college, Meharry, and her parents saw to it that, every week, their little girl made the 50-mile trip (by segregated bus) to Meharry for Wilma’s treatments, while at home her siblings conducted the massages and manipulations the docs prescribed for paralysis patients. As she recovered health and strength, she found a talent that outed in sporting success: “Skeeter” could run like the wind. At the Rome Olympics, 1960, in stifling heat, Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals. She was a European sensation. The Italians called her La gazzella nera. In Paris she was La perla noire. Black she was, so back home it might have been different, but at Wilma’s insistence, Nashville, Tennessee integrated itself for her victory parade. And the Kennedy administration knew a good thing, and so after just a few more sporting appearances (including at the Drake Relays, in Des Moines, 1961, which I attended) she became a sports ambassador for her country. Her appearance at Drake brought back memories of her idol, Jesse Owens, and his three medals at Berlin, 1936. Like Owens, she would later (1968) be the marshal of the Drake Relays parade. And she retired from active competition to teach, to coach, and to head a sports foundation. Three medals were good enough for Owens, she thought, and should be enough for her, too. ©

[Stanley]

My girls are my girls. Margaret Kelly Leibovici, Miss Bluebell.

Say what you will, the French are different. So in 2000 they conferred their highest civilian award, the Legion d’honneur, on Miss Bluebell, then aged 90, a dance impresario, and not in ballet but in revues, nude dancers after 1970, and her “Bluebell Girls” (Les Blue Belles) danced not only at the Paris Lido and the Folies Bergère but in Las Vegas and other infamous places. When Miss Bluebell died, in 2004, Paris mourned, hundreds of Bluebell girls sent letters of respect, and many returned to Paris to follow the cortège to the Montmartre cemetery, where today her headstone carries her sculpture portrait and likenesses of her national awards. In 2010, Paris celebrated the centenary of her birth with, among other things, performances at the Lido. Back on June 24, 1910, Miss Bluebell was an illegitimate baby, adopted by a nurse and named Margaret Kelly. A frail child, her doctor gave her the name Bluebell for her bright eyes and her charming smile. He also prescribed exercise, and so it was—by a very long road that began with traditional Scottish reels—that in 1932 Margaret Kelly became the lead dancer of a named troupe, Les blue belles, at the Folies Bergère. She also became something of a war hero, refusing to dance for the occupying Germans, hiding away her Romanian Jewish husband and smuggling food to him (Marcel Leibovici, who wrote songs for Edith Piaf and who died in 1961, rests with her at Montmartre), and caring for their four children. In 1948 she became a citoyenne of France, and a Parisian fixture, working out of her flat off the Champs Élysées, dining in posh restaurants with her handicapped granddaughter, and until her official retirement in 1989 overseeing nightly performances of her dancers, whom she always referred to as “my girls.” As well as the legion d’honneur, she was Chevalier des arts et des lettres, and in 1996 Queen Elizabeth II unbuckled enough to make this Irish waif a Dame Commander, OBE. So perhaps the Brits are different, too. ©

[Stanley]

My girls are my girls. Margaret Kelly Leibovici, Miss Bluebell.

Say what you will, the French are different. So in 2000 they conferred their highest civilian award, the Legion d’honneur, on Miss Bluebell, then aged 90, a dance impresario, and not in ballet but in revues, nude dancers after 1970, and her “Bluebell Girls” (Les Blue Belles) danced not only at the Paris Lido and the Folies Bergère but in Las Vegas and other infamous places. When Miss Bluebell died, in 2004, Paris mourned, hundreds of Bluebell girls sent letters of respect, and many returned to Paris to follow the cortège to the Montmartre cemetery, where today her headstone carries her sculpture portrait and likenesses of her national awards. In 2010, Paris celebrated the centenary of her birth with, among other things, performances at the Lido. Back on June 24, 1910, Miss Bluebell was an illegitimate baby, adopted by a nurse and named Margaret Kelly. A frail child, her doctor gave her the name Bluebell for her bright eyes and her charming smile. He also prescribed exercise, and so it was—by a very long road that began with traditional Scottish reels—that in 1932 Margaret Kelly became the lead dancer of a named troupe, Les blue belles, at the Folies Bergère. She also became something of a war hero, refusing to dance for the occupying Germans, hiding away her Romanian Jewish husband and smuggling food to him (Marcel Leibovici, who wrote songs for Edith Piaf and who died in 1961, rests with her at Montmartre), and caring for their four children. In 1948 she became a citoyenne of France, and a Parisian fixture, working out of her flat off the Champs Élysées, dining in posh restaurants with her handicapped granddaughter, and until her official retirement in 1989 overseeing nightly performances of her dancers, whom she always referred to as “my girls.” As well as the legion d’honneur, she was Chevalier des arts et des lettres, and in 1996 Queen Elizabeth II unbuckled enough to make this Irish waif a Dame Commander, OBE. So perhaps the Brits are different, too. ©

[Stanley]

Have fun, and go home when you're tired. George Abbott.

One way to achieve obscurity is to outlive all your contemporaries, but George Abbott (who lived to be 107) didn’t manage even that. Aged 106, he attended opening night of the revival of Damn Yankees, and walked to the stage to thunderous applause. When the show (he wrote the book and directed) had its premiere, in 1955, Abbott was already 72. He’d just finished Pajama Game (1954) and would win the Pulitzer for Fiorello! in 1959. And he’d go on from there although from 1970 or so it was often revivals of earlier hits. George Abbott was born in a New York suburb on June 25, 1887, and grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he worked as a Western Union messenger until delinquency problems sent him to a military academy. There he learned to behave well enough to become a successful football player at the University of Rochester. But he was already stage-struck, his first role coming in 1913, a bit part as a drunken college youth. Ten years later, he started to write, then to direct, and though he made some movies he always gravitated back to Broadway. His hits included Chicago (the first one, 1926), Pal Joey (1940), Sweet Charity (1942), Call Me Madam (1950), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), and many others (as producer and/or director and/or writer), but he was as well known for his ability to spot and nurture talent, starting with Paul Muni, whom he snatched (as Muni Weisenfreund) from the Yiddish Theatre, and Helen Hayes, and running on through Shirley Booth, Eddie Albert, Van Johnson, Gene Kelly, and Shirley MacLaine. On the production side, too, he discovered or boosted the likes of Bob Fosse and Harold Prince. Abbott was a gregarious, cheerful sort of fellow, but in the theatre he preserved a distance for himself. He ate three good meals daily, went home when he was tired, played golf whenever he could (and until he was 102), rarely drank alcohol, and to everyone, even colleagues, he was always (and almost forever) “Mr. Abbott.” ©

[Stanley]

It was all about how numbers could live in houses with addresses and how if they did they could be kept track of during a calculation. Freddie Williams, 1975.

By the early 60s computers were more than curiosities, and both my undergrad roommates worked in Penn’s computer lab. Penn had one (of several) claims to have invented the world’s first computer, but while this one was not the “ENIAC” of 1946 it was big, it did make a lot of whirring noises, and the room was warm. The main reason for the size and heat was the cathode ray tube, quite a few of them, that, before ‘solid state’ technology, was where you might (if you knew the right language) find the machine’s Random Access Memory (“RAM”: its stored memory, then on magnetic tapes, was the reason for the whirring noises). Those tubes were called “Williams tubes,” for Sir Frederic (“Freddie”) Williams, the pleasantly eccentric British scientist who’d figured out how to enlist the cathode ray tube in the service of high speed computing. Born near Manchester on June 26, 1911, Williams won his BSc there and spent most of his working life at Manchester University. At the time he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1950) Williams was best known (and made FRS) for his critical inventions in radar technology, but come the peace he had, in 1946-48, with his graduate student Tom Kilburn developed the memory storage potential of the cathode ray tube. The technical details of that are quite beyond me (something to do with the persistence of electron imaging on phosphorous), but it was done in Freddie Williams’s own eccentric style, for he was a living, breathing Professor Brainstawm, a “string and sealing wax” inventor. So for that matter was Tom Kilburn, and when they put all those cathode ray tubes together they christened the resulting computer their “Manchester Baby.” Along with ENIAC it is another of those “first” computers, and by the time Freddie Williams was knighted (in 1976), he was more famous for the “Manchester Baby” than for the radar. Which was really the more important depends on time and perspective. ©

[PanBiker]

Not forgetting the true first computer, Colossus developed at Bletchley Park to crack the Lorenze cypher during WWII. It first ran in late 1943 and by January 1944 was deciphering German High Command traffic confirming that they had accepted the deception of an invasion in the Pas de Calais as opposed to Operation Overlord on the Normandy beaches. The numerous Colossus machines built and all but a few dismantled at the end of hostilities and held in secret for over 30 years allowing ENIAC and Manchester Babe to steal the limelight. Our own GCHQ which morphed from Bletchley after the war kept two machines as they knew the Russians adopted the Lorenze technology as part of the spoils of war. They in turn were dismantled in the 1960's.

Bletchley Park - Home of the WWII Codebreakers

[Stanley]

How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep. Fitzgerald speaking to Joyce, June 27, 1928.

I looked forward to seeing Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), for since reading Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1951 edition) I’d been fascinated by ‘lost generation’ stuff. The idea of being a “fly on the wall” with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, et al, was intriguing. And although the film’s love story got in the way, the fantasy was fine, and Ernest, Scott and Gertrude (and Dali, Buñuel and Josephine Baker) were all present and accounted for. But Allen missed the midnight he should have used, the one on June 27, 1928, when Sylvia Beach (then certainly the world’s most famous bookseller) invited Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to dinner with James and Nora Joyce (and some others) at her flat. It was above Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, then located at 12 Rue de L’Odéon. It was a memorable evening for the Fitzgeralds. A little later, Scott drew a “last supper” sketch of it (in the style of Thurber rather than Michelangelo) in the frontispiece of Beach’s copy of The Great Gatsby (1925), entitling it “The Festival of St. James,” with a halo over Joyce’s head. He also misdated the dinner. But in her memoirs, Beach got it right, and remembered the night’s embarrassments rather than its wonders, with Scott fawning all over James Joyce (aka “St. James”), kneeling before him, making extravagant love to Nora (“the most beautiful woman in the world,” he called her), threatening to jump off Beach’s balcony if Nora failed to reciprocate, and indeed pirouetting drunkenly on the stone railing, frightening everyone. Goodness knows what the Joyces thought. The Fitzgeralds had had too much success, and too much money, Beach wistfully recalled, and reacted by trying to drink it away when they couldn’t give it away. Now a midnight like that one might have saved cured Midnight in Paris’s hero, Gil Pender, of his romantic notions about the lost generation. But then, Woody Allen would have lost his plot. ©

[Stanley]

We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, letter to Charles Bordes, ca. 1751.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not live to see the French Revolution, but his celebration of reason and his veneration for the “popular will,” somewhat contradictory beliefs in themselves, made him hero enough to the revolutionaries that, even while they were sending each other to the guillotine, they agreed that Rousseau’s bones deserved to lie in the Panthéon, right next to Voltaire’s. There they still lie. Had Rousseau survived into the revolutionary era, he surely would have fallen victim to the Terror, for he had a talent for offending even his friends. Contrariness may have been bred into him. Born in Geneva (on June 28, 1712) into a family with a tradition of dissent (on both his mother’s and father’s side), his mother’s death and his father’s exile made him an orphan, shunted from uncle to uncle and then, as his talents became apparent, from patron to patron. Something of his temperament may be divined from his autobiographical reflection on his mother’s death (of puerperal fever, from birthing him) as “the first of my misfortunes.” Or, he might better have said, the last of hers. But he went on from strength to strength, becoming a European sensation, and is today credited with originating the “Romantic” sensibility, popularizing the ideas of the social contract and the “noble savage,” and, arguably, giving shape and purpose to the modern novel. His ideas constantly got him in trouble and needy for friends, most of whom he then offended. He even fell out with the notoriously equable David Hume, who’d offered Rousseau asylum in Britain from an edict of the French Parlement, and who finally concluded (absent any other reasonable explanation) that the man was quite mad. One person who apparently tolerated Rousseau’s “scolding” was one of Europe’s more interesting enlightened despots, Frederick the Great, who offered refuge to “this poor unfortunate,” commenting that “his only offense is to have strange opinions which he thinks are good ones.” ©

[Stanley]

The main thing is to get the camera to see it the way you see it. James Van Der Zee.

The photograph is a great source for modern history, particularly valuable for ‘telling it like it was.’ Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) punctured a few holes in the idea that life in rural America was a bucolic idyll. But many families, including mine, have their reassuring record of formal photographs showing ancestors in comfortable poses and pleasant places. For African Americans, the picture record is biased in favor of showing poverty and persecution. However, there was a black middle class that wanted its picture taken, and James Van Der Zee answered the call. Born in Lenox, MA, on June 29, 1886, James moved to Harlem in 1906 and worked in service jobs, but something of his aspirations can be divined from his interests in classical music (violin and piano). And then there was photography. He’d won a camera in 1897, and by the time he’d settled in NYC he had the what he needed to set up shop as a portrait photographer. The black community was stirring with ambition, and you can see it like it was through Van Der Zee’s photographs, not only of famous individuals of the Harlem Renaissance and the black nationalist movement (e.g. Countee Cullen and Marcus Garvey), but of proud young men fashionably dressed in office attire and professional women photographed in ways making it clear they were on their way up, of families in pleasing places and poses, and of Harlem celebrations—and funerals—on the streets, in school auditoria, in churches. Outside of Harlem, Van Der Zee’s work was little known, but the modern civil rights movement brought him to the nation’s attention and before he died (on 1983) he had the pleasure of seeing an edition of his work put out by Toni Morrison and special exhibitions in NYC and Washington. His excellent photos, expressive of our national history, are at the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery, and you can see many, for yourself, on-line. ©

[Stanley]

I am Dorothy Rogers Tilly. I am of the South, born and bred in the South . . . I know its heartbeats and heartthrobs, and they are my heartbeats and heartrhobs. Dorothy Tilly's testimony, Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, 1959.

Other than the rosy glow cast by the performance of Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), not much attention has been paid to the role southern white women played in ameliorating southern “race” relations. We have heard quite a bit about the other side, notably the race-baiter Rebecca Latimer Fulton (1835-1930), first (and so far only) woman senator from Georgia, white supremacist, indeed a fierce advocate of racial lynchings. But there were others, one of them Dorothy Rogers Tilly, born on June 30, 1883. At that time her father was a rural Methodist parson; before she married he became president of a small Methodist college. In both places, Miss Dorothy Rogers “saw and heard the troubles of the community . . . pour over the doorstep.” Those troubles were black and they were white, and after doctors told her she could have no more children, Dorothy Rogers Tilly spent much of her energy and her long life to address those troubles. Her work, and her courage, brought her to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and then Harry Truman who, when looking for white southerners to join his famous Civil Rights Committee (1947), chose Tilly (one of only two women. The other was Sadie Alexander, a pioneering black lawyer from Philadelphia). Dorothy Tilly’s work with the poor, black and white, and, very publicly, against lynching, also brought her to the attention of the Klan, and so she and her family were often threatened with bombing or worse. Undaunted, she installed a phonograph next her phone, so when a caller threatened her, she played back into the phone a recording of the Lord’s Prayer. Seeing that segregation’s days were—and ought to be—numbered, she devoted the rest of her years to her “Fellowship of the Concerned,” founded by her in 1949, whose thousands of members—mainly southern white women—advocated racial integration as the best solution for all southerners whatever their gender or their mixture of skin pigments. ©

[Stanley]

Looking back at my younger self, I wish I had been more guarded in my language. Olivia de Havilland, 2017, discussing her lawsuit against FX network.

It surprises me that one of the front-line cast of Gone with the Wind (1939) is still alive and kicking, but then she had good genes. Her mother, Lily, lived to 89; her father, Walter, died at 95; her sister, Joan, made it to 96: and family longevity goes back at least another generation. The woman in question is Olivia de Havilland, born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, and today celebrating her 102nd birthday in the posh Paris hotel where she lives quietly but not reclusively. Only last year she emerged from her private life to receive appointment as Dame Commander, OBE, from another aged lady, and also to mount a lawsuit against Fox (FX, the network) in defense of her privacy. The issue there was her temperament, or rather FX’s portrayal of it in the documentary “Feud: Bette and Joan,” a film about Hollywood’s most famous mud-slingers, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in which our Olivia was portrayed, rather bitchily, by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Olivia de Havilland claimed the portrayal was false (in several particulars and in general) but also that it invaded her rights to privacy. It was therefore potentially a landmark lawsuit, for if nothing else Olivia de Havilland had been, in her 55-year film and stage career (she retired in 1988), an intensely public person and therefore, like our politicians and presidents, subject to fair (and unfair) comment. The suit was thrown out by a lower court but recently de Havilland has asked the California Supreme Court to take it up again, on appeal. That raises another possible explanation (in addition to genetic inheritance) of her longevity, for her whole family could be said to have shown itself too ornery to succumb to any ordinary illness. Her father, a lawyer and law professor in Japan, didn’t get on with her mother. Her mother didn’t get on with her sister, Joan Fontaine. And whatever her lawsuit might say it’s pretty clear that Olivia didn’t get on with either Joan Fontaine or Joan Crawford. ©