BOB'S BITS

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"[the variable velocities of] stars turned out to be of fundamental importance [but] at the time I was just puzzled by it." Jan Oort

The belief that the earth was the center of the universe persisted for centuries before it was shattered by Copernicus and Kepler. It seems almost pathetic, then, that humans (quite a number of them actual astronomers) persisting in thinking—or hoping—that the earth must be at the center of something, perhaps the Milky Way. Along with this the belief persisted that the Milky Way, itself, might be the whole show, might contain the entirety of the universe. The children’s books on astronomy that I devoured in grade school (ca. 1948-1955) certainly gave me that impression, for instance making it necessary to think that the Milky Way’s cloudy bits (called nebulae) were all, in fact, just cloudy bits. But well before 1948 scientists knew that some of those cloudy bits were in fact other milky ways, other galaxies, and that even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, was not at the center of anything. Much of this knowledge owed to the work of Jan Hendrik Oort, born in Friesland, Dutch Republic, on April 28, 1900, the descendant (on both sides) of generations of Dutch clergymen, some of them distinguished theologians. Jan, a school over-achiever, may be said to have emulated them by becoming a physicist and astronomer, studying first at Groningen and then, in 1922, as a post-graduate student at Yale. He was already involved in tracking Milky Way stars and trying to make sense of their differing speeds and common direction, out of which came our modern conception that the Milky Way is an orbital galaxy, that our local mini-verse (aka the solar system) is quite a ways off center, and that further out are many other galaxies, milky ways to the power of n, some of them not very much like our orbital Milky Way at all but mere “agglomerations” of stars. Oort was for a long time professor of astronomy at Leiden, a tenure interrupted by his protest against the expulsion of Jewish colleagues during the German occupation. At Leiden, he also advocated the development and then pioneered the use of radio telescopes. He is perhaps best known today, however, for his discovery of the Oort Belt, a vast territory on the outskirts of the solar system, whence come our comets, interstellar (but probably not intergalactic) visitors of eccentric habits. ©

[Stanley]

"I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself?" Margaret Atwood.

Most who know me will concede that I am not a fashion plate, and a few will know that I have a particular disregard for hats. This latter quirk has become a non-problem, as through most of my lifetime the hat has, or hats in general have, gone out of style. Women’s hats are a sort of exception, for in many places, on special occasions (for instance Royal Ascot), women will wear the damnedest things atop their heads. Indeed, at those times and places the hat may be the chef d’oeuvre of female attire. I checked this out on the Royal Ascot website (“Ascot is back!”, they hopefully proclaim) to find that there are actually rules for hats and for a lacier sort of headwear called “the fascinator.” Such attention to detail might have pleased Aage Gjerfing Thaarup who, despite being born in Copenhagen (on April 29, 1906) had by the 1930s become London’s leading hatmaker, a style-setter whose clientele included the royals and whose hats (or fascinators, a style of American origin) could always be seen at the right places, the right times, and on the right heads. Thaarup, the second of four brothers, grew up on the nether edges of the Danish middle class and was educated at commercial school. His first employment was as a trainee salesman (millinery, of course) at Copenhagen’s largest department store, but at this retail interface between hat manufacturer and hat wearer he developed a design sense and an ambition to take it to a wider, more elite market. This itch took him to Berlin, then Paris, then London, then India (where he hatted the ladies of the vice-regal court), and then back to London where, from 1935 to 1955 he ruled the hat world as designer, maker, seller and indeed, for a time, as president of the Associated Millinery Designers of London. Chasing taste is, however, a feverish pursuit, and Thaarup’s generosities and lack of capital support brought him to bankruptcy in 1955. He’d made many friends, and with their help he continued to prosper as elder statesman of hats (and trainer of several now-famous milliners). He also became known as the Mad Hatter, flamboyant to a fault, the author of a hatter’s autobiography (Heads and Tales, 1956) and with his work scattered in various fashion museums, hats making statements all the time. ©

[Stanley]

"I am from Des Moines, Iowa . . . just a silly person with a funny bone." Cloris Leachman

An old friend, already in high school a self-confessed cynic, once told me that Des Moines could never produce good actors because growing up there made people too sincere. That was in the early 60s, when he must have known of two accomplished actors were not only born there but went to our high school, Phyllis Love (mainly stage) and Cloris Leachman (mainly film and TV). Love (whose acting career was shorter) I will save for another day, but Cloris Leachman was born in Des Moines on April 30, 1926, and her career went on almost forever, from her debut in 1948 to 2020. She died in January 2021, aged 94, and in her New York Times obituary was remembered as a versatile actor who was best known (and most awarded) for her roles in TV sitcoms, for instance as the scatterbrained Phyllis Lindstrom in the Mary Tyler Moore series in the 1970s. She won two Emmys for that; and a spinoff show, Phyllis, followed on, in which she starred. Perhaps oddly, for a Des Moinesian (for besides being sincere we are also a bit dour), her best roles on TV and film were comedic, for instance in three Mel Brooks films. But Leachman wasn’t known for sentimentality, and didn’t enjoy her year as ‘mom’ on the serial “Lassie.” She saw her release from that as a liberation. By all odds her best role was that of Ruth Popper, the lonely, unhappy wife of the local football coach in Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show.” Cloris Leachman won an Oscar (1971) for that role, and I must say that in it she absolutely oozed sincerity. At the Oscars awards that year Leachman accepted her Best Supporting Actress award in celebratory mood and said she was going to take her Oscar “and run with it.” And so she did, for another 50 years, suggesting endurance (or obstinacy?) as yet another Des Moines inheritance. ©

[Stanley]

"Hail bounteous May that dost inspire// Mirth, and youth, and warm desire." John Milton, On May Morning.

May 1 is May Day. Later today I will walk (about 5 miles) in and around Forest Park, where nearly all of the trees (not yet the oaks or the beeches) will be fully-leaved, and in a few the leaves will already be turning towards the deeper, soberer green of mid-summer. But on most trees, the leaves of spring still retain, on May 1, the color that I call spring green: a paler green but so bright that ‘pale’ is not really right. For years I’ve also called it an ‘electric’ green, for there is a buzz to it. That buzz has inspired most human cultures to celebrate rites of spring, “May Days” (although not necessarily on our May 1). We cannot date May Day’s origin except to say that these May Days have come down to us from time out of mind, for we know that they were being practiced before humans began to write. In Merrie Olde Englande, May Day included a May Pole streaming ribbons or maybe strings around which the maidens of the vicinage danced, perhaps to attract the attention of young males but possibly not. At any rate the general air was one of fertile promise, warm gaiety, and at least a little disorder, for these spring rites were often accompanied by the idea of misrule and might even include a ritual role for a Lord of Misrule. This may be why, at Greenwood Grade School in Des Moines, in Spring (possibly on May 1, who knows?) we had a Backwards Day where the pupils and the livelier teachers wore something backwards or, failing that (for one needed some help to wear a buttoned shirt backwards), put their right shoes on their wrong feet. The New England Puritans disapproved of anything that smelled of paganism or threatened misrule, and so (as with Christmas) made May Day illegal. On the other hand, in later ages, socialists made May Day into a celebration of a utopian future. We can date that one to May 1, 1889. Trust tsarist Russia to come up with a gloomier May Day tradition, which influenced Stravinsky and Nijinsky when, in Paris in 1913, they composed and choreographed The Rite of Spring, or Le Sacre du printemps, a ballet which ends with a sacrificial maiden dancing herself to death. But it was still Spring (the premiere came on May 22, 1913), and the music itself foretold the blossoming of modernism. Happy May Day!!

[Stanley]

“Things change, and not always for the better.”― from the novel "Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution"

My great-grandma Clara Kerr died in Pasadena in 1915, but her husband wanted her buried out of her house so the body was shipped, by rail, to Grundy Center, IA. It was a long journey, with transfers, and the poor condition of Clara’s body became the subject of legendary stories, told by my mother, another Clara, who was born just weeks after the body’s arrival. The relish with which mom told these (and some similar) stories led some to think that my family’s sense of humor languished somewhere between the Gruesome and the Gothic. I hope not; but the problem of deteriorating corpses is an old one and is the probable origin of the art of rendering human likenesses in wax. Some corpses, especially royal ones, had to be held in store to ensure a proper funeral and burial which included displaying the body en plein air. The longer the time and the warmer the climate, the more likely it was that the real body would look badly and smell worse, and in medieval times the practice grew to render a likeness in wax, to be placed atop the casket. One of the oldest is in the museum of Westminster Abbey, London, a wax likeness of Edward III (who died in midsummer, 1377). As with many luxuries, this trickled down into the nobility and bourgeoisie, and soon wax likenesses were being made of living human beings, portraits on commission, in addition to or instead of the traditional oil on canvas. The supreme practitioner of this art was Isaac Gosset, born on the isle of Jersey on May 2, 1713, a child of Huguenot refugees. Isaac moved to London where he established a business—and a reputation—carving elaborate picture frames. In this art world, he also apprenticed to his uncle Matthew, already a fashionable wax modeler, and in good Huguenot tradition he improved on the quality and the quantity of his uncle’s work. Original Isaac Gosset waxes (in bas relief style, in white or cream-colored wax, and enclosed in an oval frame) sell today at auction for thousands. Most are portraits, but a good number are waxen images of classical models, the Caesars and of Greek and Roman gods. Thus was the way paved for Madame Marie Tussaud (1761-1850) to make a business of life-sized waxen models, a business which really took off during the French Revolution when she was commissioned to “do” the heads of the Revolution’s most eminent victims, from Louis XVI to Marat and Robespierre. There is no doubt that this is what Daniel Kerr should have done, in 1915, but the art was not yet available in Pasadena and certainly not in Grundy Center, and a life-sized cameo would have been far too dear. ©

[Stanley]

"If I could be an author like you I would certainly not be a manager. I am simply the tradesman who sells your works of art". D'Oyly Carte to W. S. Gilbert, ca. 1890, during the so-called Carpet Quarrel.

Victorian London’s rising middle class was partly defined by what it consumed, and—cushioned by the low wages paid to domestic servants and factory hands—it was able to buy what it wanted. And so, to meet these demands, along came the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan, with a string of runaway hits (1875-1890) that made almost everyone happy, then and since. But this was not just another market miracle, supply arising to meet demand; it also owed much to the entrepreneur-impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, born on May 3, 1844 in then-fashionable Soho, London. Well educated but without a degree, he became D’Oyly Carte, first an apprentice woodwind maker in his father’s firm but soon the agent for a string of famous artistes, musicians, singers, actors, capable also of taking on commissions in theatre management. He was also a composer of light music, and if a self-confessed dilletante, his ambition grew to provide a distinctively English twist to light opera, then a field dominated by French composers and lyricists. And it was while managing a London run of Offenbach’s La périchole that D’Oyly Carte suggested, to Arthur Sullivan, that it would be a good idea to set new lyrics for W. S. Gilbert’s Trial by Jury. Intended merely as a ‘filler’ for La périchole, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial became the hit of the 1875 season. Impressed by their own success and by D’Oyly Carte’s charm and acumen, Gilbert & Sullivan became a legal partnership, and then a trade name. And the silent partner (who, by the way, drew up the agreement) was Richard D’Oyly Carte. In public, it worked so well that The Sorcerer (1877), HMS Pinafore (1878), and The Pirates of Penzance (1880) have entered our language as things in themselves. Meanwhile, partly to combat unlicensed runs (in the English provinces and in the USA). D’Oyly Carte redrew the legal map to make “Mr. R. D’Oyly Carte’s Opera Company” the sole agent for Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. It was not exactly a happy and certainly not a placid marriage, and salving ‘temperaments’ between G & S became one of the chief businesses of D’Oyly Carte and his second wife. Susan Lenoir. This arrangement not only extended the string of successes to include (e.g.) The Mikado (1885) and The Gondoliers (1887) but also D‘Oyly Carte’s construction of a luxury hotel and its nearby theatre, both called the Savoy. So another name for G&S productions became “the Savoy Operas.” All good things must, I suppose, come to an end sometimes, and continued spats between Gilbert and Sullivan finally brought the thing permanently down in the 1890s. But not the legal connection, and so the classic successes went on being staged by the D’Oyly Carte Company and then the D’Oyly Carte Trust until at least 1982. It’s hard to keep a good thing down. ©

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"Beauty is being the best possible version of yourself." Audrey Hepburn.

Audrey Hepburn broke into stardom in 1952 playing opposite Gregory Peck in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. The studio had wanted Elizabeth Taylor for the role, but having seen Hepburn in a screen test Wyler was adamant. “She had everything, charm, innocence, talent. She was also very funny. She was absolutely enchanting.” Peck, already established, concurred, and saw to it that she had equal billing with him, even though she was then only 23. “You’ve got to change it,” he said, “because she’ll be a big star, and I’ll look like a big jerk.” I never know how to take these later recollections of prophetic insight, and in this case Hepburn had already gathered up her own head of steam so I wonder how much help she really needed, for she’d already learned how to be—and was—charming, innocent, and talented. Audrey Hepburn was born to a couple of European aristocrats in a Brussels suburb on May 4, 1929. The accidents of warfare placed Audrey and her mother in jeopardy, and perhaps in rebellion against her mother Hepburn did some minor (but risky) work for the Dutch resistance, and came out of it all knowing something about playing a role and about how to get by on very little food. After a spell in ballet schools (first in Holland, then London) she decided her better future lay in acting. She was “discovered” several times before Wyler and Peck ever met her, including by Colette, who insisted that Hepburn play the lead in Colette’s Gigi, a stage production that started with great success in New York and then on tour. Roman Holiday then continued Hepburn on her path, which led to unforgettable performances in (among others) Sabrina (1953), War and Peace (1956). Funny Face and Love in the Afternoon (both 1957). These films explored her many talents (including singing and dancing) and won Hepburn the roles for which she is most famous, Holly Golightly (in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961, and Liza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady, 1964. I was not nor ever became a film buff, but I saw Hepburn in most of these roles (and a few others), and I agree wholeheartedly with Wyler and Peck. Hepburn’s other selfs included her fashion-plate role in making Givenchy more famous and, especially, her commitment to UNICEF, a real-life role which came to dominate her life: charm, innocence, and talent re-engineered to serve the needs of children who (like Hepburn in her teens) had fallen prey to hunger, war, and disease, and through no fault of their own. It was an exhausting world tour for UNICEF that may have precipitated Hepburn’s last, and fatal, illness. She died in 1993 and is buried, in a churchyard near her home in Switzerland, beneath a plain wooden cross. ©

[Stanley]

"Go to it, my Southern Brothers. The North needs you.'' From an Abbot editorial in the Defender, 1915.

When Vice-President Kamala Harris traveled to Chicago recently to tout Joe Biden’s ‘American Recovery’ plans, she spoke to many, but she made sure that the ‘many’ included the editorial board of the Chicago Defender. Today the Defender has, like many newspapers, reverted (in 2019) to on-line only publication, not daily but weekly, as it struggles to make ends meet and to retain the journalists it is able to find in a national market which (for black reporters and commentators) is newly competitive. In its prime, the Defender had been the employer of choice for such reporters as Ida B. Wells and Louis Lomax and creative writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes; and for several decades the paper could claim to be the nation’s largest (in terms of circulation) and heaviest (in terms of impact and influence) Black daily. But in a sense going on-line and weekly was going back to the Defender’s early years. The Chicago Defender began life as a weekly, published out of a boarding house by its founder Robert Sengstacke Abbot from May 5, 1905. Then (of course) it could not have been an internet paper, but for every newspaper it sold it has been estimated that there were an additional four or five “on-line” readers as the Defender was passed from hand to hand and from city to city, often by subscribers who were pullman porters on Chicago’s long-distance trains, e.g. the Broadway Limited to the east, the City of New Orleans to the south (where secondary readers learned to conceal the paper when in public), and the prestige trans-continentals to the west. “The World’s Greatest Weekly,” as its banner proclaimed it to be, crusaded for civil rights, for the end of lynch law, for Chicago as the best available home for blacks fleeing from the South, and—pretty soon after 1905—for a good, cold, hard look at the Republican Party, the traditional home of those Blacks who could vote. Like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Defender’s chief rival in its circulation claims, the Defender made its final jump to the Democratic Party along with FDR’s New Deal. Then, after four decades’ success as a weekly, the Defender became a daily at the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s partly because it could afford to. And with so much moral energy and hope in the air, it could not afford to remain a weekly. Its 2019 reversion to a weekly format reflects not a change in the Black community but a response to the economic pressures now affecting news publications in general. Its interesting roots in the Sengstacke family (which still figures among the Defender’s largest stockholders), the progeny of a German ships captain engaged (circa 1860) in the cotton trade between Hamburg and Savannah, will have to be saved for a later anniversary note. ©

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"We have never conformed with that class of philosophers who would keep the people in ignorance, lest they might change their opinion from former predilections." Martin Delany, 1852

Senator John Heinz III was of that now-vanished species, the liberal Republican, and a successful one, riding his increasing majorities (in his last Pennsylvania senatorial campaign he won 2/3rds of the popular vote) to the point where he could consider a presidential run. All that came to an end in 1991 with an odd, and spectacular, mid-air collision. Led by his widow Teresa, Heinz’s family and friends hurried to memorialize him, establishing several charitable trusts and the John Heinz History Center, in Pittsburgh. For a long time, perhaps still, visitors at the center were greeted by a mannequin of another leading Pittsburgh politician, Martin Robison Delany, born in what is now West Virginia on May 6, 1812. Delany was a fitting choice for, like John Heinz, he was a maverick. That began early for, although Delany’s father was a slave, his mother, Pati, was a free woman of color, and thus (by Virginia law) Delany was born a free person. In a slave state, there was not much security in that for Martin Delany, and in 1831, aged 19, he moved North, to Pittsburgh. There Delany flourished in several ways, becoming a medical doctor (with the help of three white physicians who were also abolitionists), a journalist-publisher (of The Mystery, the first of several important Black newspapers in Pittsburgh), and a leading abolitionist. And then his Civil War service made him the first black man (by several decades) to attain the rank of Major. But Delany was his own man, guided by his own star and inspired by credible family legends (on both his father’s and mother’s side) of roots in West African tribal nobilities. His aim was to gain freedom and equality for his people, and this led him away from the integrationist aims of most of his contemporaries, including Douglass, to make Martin Delany the father of Black Nationalism. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was in West Africa examining the prospects there for nationhood, and it was only the Civil War that could have brought him back. But his brave war service did not make him a Republican. In Reconstruction South Carolina, Delany looked for power to achieve his ambitions, and at the very end of his life made a controversial alliance with Senator Wade Hampton, a race-baiting conservative and an advocate of a whites-only politics. Time would soon tell that this was not a wise choice, but Martin Delany died before time. As a political maverick he was a good choice for front-man at the Heinz Center. Just so, Teresa Heinz would make her own path, marrying Democrat John Kerry in 1996 but not changing her own political registration until 2003. ©

[Stanley]

Mary Eliza Mahoney, 1845-1926, pioneer in nursing.

The New England Hospital for Women and Children was founded by Dr. Marie Zakrzewska (1829-1902) on July 1, 1862, its revolutionary purpose implied by its name, for in its first few decades it was also an important center for the education and qualification of women as doctors and nurses. Zakrzewska herself was well qualified to take on this medico-political role, for she had had to fight like a tiger to break into the nursing profession in her native Berlin. Wanting to go further, she emigrated to the USA where she qualified MD with the help of Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman MD in America. So it was no surprise, perhaps, that when Mary Eliza Mahoney, the child of black slaves, applied for the hospital’s nursing program, she was accepted. Mahoney was a star student, graduating in 1879 to become the USA’s first black registered nurse, one of only three graduates in an entering cohort of 31. Mary Eliza Mahoney was born in Dorchester, MA, on May 7, 1845. Her parents had been slaves in North Carolina; once emancipated they moved to Massachusetts in hopes of finding better prospects for themselves and their children. One such avenue was education, and in 1855 Mahoney was admitted to the racially integrated Phillips School where she first committed herself to become a professional nurse. For a black female, that was a hard goal to achieve, and at first Mahoney took employment as a “laborer” (cook and washerwoman) at Marie Zakrzewska’s hospital. Her 15 years’ faithful service in that position may be why she was admitted to the nursing program even though, at 37, she was well above the age limit. After qualification, Mary Eliza took work as a private nurse to wealthy families, probably because public hospitals wouldn’t hire her. But she used her success in private nursing to become a leading advocate of non-discrimination for the whole nursing profession. In this she was quite successful, and soon the American Nurses Association became, itself, a racially integrated professional body. Having achieved that, Mahoney then turned her attention to the movement for female suffrage. She died, full of years and honors, in 1926, aged 80. ©

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"The closest thing I have to a nutritionist is the Carlsberg Beer Company." Colin Farrell.

If you were among those wanting, today, to propose a toast to the memory of Emil Christian Hansen (who was born in Ribe, Denmark, on May 8, 1842) please make sure that you use lager beer, not champagne nor even an English-style ale or bitter. Hansen did not ‘invent’ lager beer, nor for that matter was he the first to discover bottom-fermenting yeast (the yeast used to make lager beer). Those things came about during the 14th century, if not earlier, especially in mid-Europe. Then all brewing was local and almost all beers (of any sort) were consumed locally. Beers did not ‘travel well,’ as the conventional phrase goes, but mainly beers did not travel much at all. But as commerce expanded, the push was on to make beer that fermented faithfully and could be sent not just to the next town but to the far corners of the earth. Emil Christian Hansen was the man whose researches made this possible. Hansen was not educated in the sciences although, at university, he did support himself by working in biology labs. After university, he made ends meet by writing novels, painting houses, and (for instance) popularizing Darwin’s theories on evolution by natural selection. But he kept working on beer-making, too, and in 1878 he was hired by Carlsberg to work in the brewery’s lab, work which he did in true Darwinian fashion by isolating different strains or species of yeast (brewers’ yeast was then, typically, a blend of yeasts), and finding which particular strain did the best work. He found it in amongst a yeast sample sent to Carlsberg in 1845 by a Munich brewery, and in 1883 published his findings, classifying yeasts scientifically (in the style of Linnaeus) and naming the crucial yeast Saccharomyces carlbergensis. A bottom-fermenter, it did the job perfectly and created a beer that could be brewed in Copenhagen, bottled, sent far and wide, and maintain its quality and clarity. Something of an idealist, and very conscious of a fraternity amongst brewers, Hansen refused to patent the strain and indeed sent out samples (and his research notes) freely when asked. On that ground alone, he’s worthy of a toast, and should probably not be blamed for making a beer that was standardized and thus, in a sense, “tasteless.” So a happy birthday toast to Emile Christian Hansen!! ©

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"Romantic novels by Mills and Boon shaped me from the age of 12 and may have ruined me for every real man since." Bella Battle [sic], in The Sun, March 2019;.

I still call Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) a romance novel even though, in my darker moments, I know that the modern ‘romance novel’ is today generally seen as “trash”, “pulp”, or “potboiler” fiction. Another particular type of the modern romance is the “bodice ripper,” and although some say that they are really, all of them, bodice rippers, the greatest of romance publishers, Mills & Boon, makes an interesting distinction by dividing its list between “spice” and “romance” novels. Whichever, it’s the sort of fiction that is read widely but furtively, which may be why, today, Mills & Boon’s list is mainly (circa 75%) electronic. The person sitting beside you in the plane, train, or bus (or for that matter bed) need not know what kind of fiction strikes your fancy if you’re holding only a I-Pad or, suggestively, a Kindle Fire. Such ideas were far from the minds of Gerald Mills and Charles Boon when, in November 1908 they quit their jobs at Methuen to form a new publishing company. Their first lists were varied, including some “serious” Methuen authors, and they quickly signed Jack London, but the company’s future lay with women authors and their ‘modern’ romances. That may have been because of Charles Boon. Born poor (on May 9. 1877) and educated only until age 12, he’d “self-made” into a top job as sales manager for Methuen, and in that position was early on the lookout for new markets and new writers, his most notable finds among the latter being women like Ethel Stevens, Ida Alexa Wylie, and Beatrice Grimshaw. As for the market, he had a sense that the female reader was the company’s best future. Charles Boon died in 1943, but two of his sons (Alan and John) ran the company even further in the direction of that female reader; their paperbacks are dressed in pink. . And both writers and readers proved exceptionally prolific for M&B. Some M&B authors produced scores of titles in far fewer years, and women readers were known to ask, at the book store or library, not for a particular book by a named author but only for the “latest Mills & Boon.” Sales grew exponentially, and M & B embraced one idea of ‘trash’ fiction by deliberately removing titles from the market and pulping them. I’ve been told that some of them are really worth reading, but I’m sticking with Jane Austen’s Mr. D’Arcy and Miss Bennett. So far, anyway. ©

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"In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements." J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science. 1939.

John Desmond (J. D.) Bernal was one of the more influential scientists of the 20th century, was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, on May 10, 1901 to an Irish farmer father and an American mother, both Catholic converts of extraordinarily diverse family backgrounds. They were also rich enough to send their son to English ‘public’ schools, which J. D. intensely disliked, but where he learned enough to be admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and natural sciences. He continued his studies at London’s Royal Institution, where his PhD mentor was William Henry Bragg. J. D.’s work there qualified him, despite his youth, as one of the founders of modern X-ray crystallography. His undergraduate and graduate successes, which he later credited to his command of mathematics, included a depiction of the molecular structure of graphite (the “Bernal Stacking”) and won him the nickname of “The Sage.” Meanwhile, he and his wife Eileen had become communists, and he’d adopted (amongst several other ambitions) the task—a second profession—of becoming a popularizer of science. His academic life began at Cambridge, where his politics kept him from a professorial appointment, and Bedford College London (1938-68) where he supervised a string of remarkable PhD students, including three Nobelists (Dorothy Hodgkins, Max Perutz, and Aaron Klug) and Rosalind Franklin, who perhaps should also have won a Nobel. In the 1930s the rise of fascism and the coming of war intensified his activism and broadened his scientific interests, and he advised the British government on many technical issues (and was the only British scientist to accompany Churchill to the Quebec Conference of 1943, which planned the D-Day invasion and to which J. D. contributed the “Mulberry”, an engineering miracle which made it possible to construct harbors ‘on the run’). His wartime contributions established a platform, too, for J. D.’s postwar contributions to the history and philosophy of science and his many writings which opened the processes of scientific thought to a wider audience. J. D. Bernal died, much lamented, in 1971, after choosing an unmarked grave for his physical remains. ©

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I brought dialogue, character and humor to Hitchcock's films. He brought the suspense." John Michael Hayes, 1999.

Since even before the talkie, money has been the magnet which pulled many famous writers to Hollywood: among them William Faulkner, Margaret Atwood, and Scott Fitzgerald. The pay could be ridiculously high, especially for a well-known author, but the many limitations of the job (at base, those imposed by writing for an overwhelmingly visual medium, made more frustrating by the production-line organization of the studios and their pursuit of bottom-line success) sent many such writers away after one or only a few films. Faulkner remembered the experience bitterly. The English humorist P. G. Wodehouse, in Tinseltown during the 1930s, found in it not “enjoyment” but a well of laughter; in several stories he made much of the studios’ “writers’ colonies” where otherwise blameless people were sentenced to living deaths in undiscovered countries from which none returned. Not so for some, however. One of the more successful of these was John Michael Hayes, born in Worcester, MA, on May 11. 1919. Childhood illness kept him out of school, sometimes for weeks on end, but not out of books, and he learned his trade through reading. After a short spell as a script writer for radio programs, he made his way into a Hollywood writers’ colony and towards a measure of fame, working closely with Hitchcock on four films, including Rear Window, where he’s said to have written in Grace Kelly (the original story had no main female character) and where he got his first Oscar nomination. He did three more Hitchcock films and then got a second Oscar nomination for rendering Peyton Place suitable for Hollywood treatment. Hayes escaped with his life, too, making him unsuitable for a Wodehouse story, and he finished out his career teaching creative writing at Dartmouth. After retirement he stayed on in Hanover (apparently preferring it to Hollywood) and died there at the ripe old age of 89. An interesting chap, this “exception,” and there’s a book about his years with Alfred Hitchcock in which you’ll find some laughter. ©

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"In Latin America a poet can't live in an ivory tower. Reality marks you." Clara Alegria.

If you are looking for an explanation of why the USA is so little trusted (and less loved) in Central America, the so-called “Banana Wars” (1898-1934) would be one place to start. The term Banana Wars was popularized, perhaps invented, much after the fact (in 1983), by Professor Lester Langley, a historian at the University of Georgia, in his eponymous book, subtitled An Inner History of American Empire, a study of American interventions in eight Central American states, including its occupation of Nicaragua, 1912-1933. It was during this occupation (May 12, 1924) that the poet Clara Isabel Alegría was born into an upper-class family that identified itself as nationalist and expressed their nationalism in left-wing activism. When she was less than a year old her doctor father was exiled by the puppet government, so she grew up in her mother’s country (El Salvador), where she began her poetry career at the tender age of 6. Later, inspired by her family’s history and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) she set out to express her politics in verse and in non-violent resistance to the established order of the Somoza regime. The Somozas, a mirror image of Clara’s families (she chose her mother’s family for her writing surname) rose to power in the time of the first Sandino rebellion (by the simple tactic of murdering Augusto César Sandino in 1936). This won USA approval, FDR famously admitting that while Somoza was a “son of a bitch” he was “our son of a bitch”, all of which gave Clara Alegría another target for her political poetry. Guided by the Spanish Nobelist Juan Ramón Jiménez and by her American husband, a journalist and diplomat, she wrote on other themes too, but when a second Sandino revolution overthrew the Somozas in 1979 it was her politics that won her influence in the revolutionary government. Given the outcome, a reinvention of the Banana Wars by Ronnie Reagan and Ollie North, she might have done better to stick to poetry, but Clara Alegría lived a long time (she died in 2018) and she continued (in person and in poetics) to voice her opposition to local dictators and to the poisoned policies of the Yankee giant to the north. ©

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"You should know how many incompetent men I have had to compete with!" Inge Lehmann.

Denmark lies in a quiet earthquake zone, so the fact that it produced one of the world’s greatest seismologists seems curious. Asked about this when she was, relatively late in life, appointed professor of geology at the University of Copenhagen, Inge Lemann (born in Copenhagen on May 13, 1888) could remember only one quake, when she was “fifteen or sixteen,” a very mild one, and her curiosity was easily satisfied when her father told her it was “just an earthquake.” Indeed Lehmann reached her eminence in seismology through a curious route, as precocious mathematics student at school and at university, and she carried on with maths as a ‘computer’ in actuarial science at the university, appointed in 1923. Looking for a better job, she was hired (again as a mathematics person, in 1925) as an assistant in the seismology department, which was apparently the first time she ever saw a seismograph. But she meant to do well with it, and was awarded an MA in 1928 and then appointment as state seismologist. As she took readings from seismographs that she’d placed in Denmark and Greenland, she noticed time intervals she’d not expected between a quake’s epicenter and its distant echoes, and set to work in true actuarial style to try to find an explanation. The result (in 1936) was an academic paper with a very short title (“P”) which, pardon the puns, shook the seismological world to its core. In “P”, Lehmann stated a new theory of the earth’s inner structures, a theory about a solid inner core surrounded by a constantly shifting mass of molten metal, a theory that has stood the test of time and many millions of seismograph readings. In 1971, her theory was confirmed by subjecting the data to a thorough computer-driven test. Better yet, Inge Lehmann lived long enough to bask in the sunshine of her success, and to reflect (sometimes caustically) on the barriers she’d faced as a female in a field that was, in 1936, virtually a male preserve. But that’s OK, too, for besides being a gifted scientist Lehmann was a campaigner for votes for Danish women, where she also enjoyed some success. Inge Lehman lived to be 104, and in downtown Copenhagen she’s remembered by a striking memorial which seeks to explain, visually, the reality she discovered through mathematics. ©

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"War, like death, is a great leveler. Mutual suffering had made us all friends." Mary Seacole, 1857.

During Mary Seacole’s first visit to London, in 1823 at the age of 18, she and her Jamaican companion were subjected to racial taunts. Later, Mary said that these were directed mainly at her friend, quite black, whereas Mary was “only a little brown.” Perhaps that was Mary Seacole’s way of dealing with, or deflecting, racial prejudice, but an 1869 portrait of her, now in London’s National Gallery, shows her as strong and resolute, indubitably of African heritage, a portrait painted to cast light, dramatically, only on her black face, her red scarf, and her medals. The reason for the medals is that Mary Seacole had become a heroine of the Crimean War (1853-56), tending the wounded and dying at the front and, behind the lines, running a home-away-from-home lodge or boarding house. That she got there and did those things testified to her maternal heritage, for in Kingston Mary had grown up in her mother’s respectable lodging house, Blundell Hall, while ‘on the side’ learning from her Creole mother how to care for the sick—whether neighbors or lodgers. So Mary Seacole became a nurse, using traditional Afro-Caribbean cures and the skills and potions she borrowed from European—mainly British—practitioners. She became also a woman of some courage, traveling to various epicenters of cholera and yellow fever outbreaks in and around the Caribbean basin. Wanting to learn more, and perhaps to spread her fame, she traveled again to Britain after the outbreak of the Crimean War to apply to Florence Nightingale’s nursing corps but was rejected, perhaps because she was ‘only a little’ brown. So she and her husband went themselves to the Crimea, dispensing care to the wounded and comfort to the rest. After the war, and having written her autobiography in 1857, Mary spent some time back in Jamaica but came back to London in 1869 where some of her old soldiers (and Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales) enabled her to live out the rest of her life (Mary Seacole died on May 14, 1881) in reasonable comfort and in high regard, not least as official masseuse to Alexandra, the Princess of Wales. She is now being read out of UK school syllabi as not being British enough, or, perhaps, as only a little too brown. ©

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Bell Finch, 1700-1771, the lady with the library.

In the 17th century, Sir William Petty, ‘the first statistician,’ reckoned that a man needed an annual income of £100 to maintain himself as a gentleman in London. In the next century—from about 1742—Cecelia Isabella Finch succeeded in the more difficult task of maintaining herself as a lady in London on £400 p.a. Of course there had been some inflation, but more to the point Finch (known to her friends as “Bell”) was descended from two noble families, the Finches and the Hattons, so her inheritances (not her income) enabled her to build a magnificent town house at 44 Berkeley Square, Mayfair. Isabella Finch was born in May 1700, the 4th daughter of Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham, and Lady Anne Hatton. Introduced early to the Hanover court, Bell Finch made herself indispensable to the Princess Amelia, and in 1738 was named First Lady of Amelia’s Bedchamber and granted the annual salary of £400 (on the crown’s Irish incomes) which was enough to maintain her household if not to build her house. Lady Bell continued in Amelia’s service (luckily for Amelia for the princess often rubbed the wrong people in the wrong way), and her income, along with her family and court connections, proved enough to enable her to live out her life as an independent woman: and a very respectable one—she kept one of London’s largest libraries at No. 44. Much later, in the 1960s, the property next door (at no. 46) became the super-chic nightclub Annabel’s, the haunt of London gentlemen like Mick Jagger and Lord Lucan, for whom £100 was nothing more than an ante in poker and much less than the cost of a dinner. Annabel’s fell on hard times, perhaps because of Lucan’s sinking reputation (he murdered his family’s nanny), but has now reinvented itself, taken over Lady Bell’s much larger townhouse, and now sells itself (rather gaudily) as the place to be seen in London for those who wish to be seen in London. From which we can conclude that it costs much more to be a gentleman in London today than it did in William Petty’s time. And, again, inflation is only partly to blame. ©

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"I'm not really Henry Fonda. No one could have that much integrity." Henry Fonda.

Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart became friends in the 1930s, when both men (when they were not “resting”) were working the New England playhouse circuit in summers and winning bit parts during the New York theatre season. The friendship continued when they (first Fonda, and then Stewart) showed up in Hollywood, and it persisted (both men joked) for the rest of their lives, as long as they didn’t talk politics. Indeed they were political opposites, but another thing they had in common is that they both volunteered for service in WWII. As Fonda put it, he did not want to fight the war in a studio, and both won combat medals for courage. In this fellowship of opposites, Fonda was the left-winger, his politics paralleled by one of his earlier starring roles, as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) the Steinbeck novel made movie-ish by director John Ford. It’s from that role, and in his leading part in Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), that those of us (of a certain age) locate Fonda’s politics, and see in Fonda a persona, a basic decency, not too very different from that of Jimmy Stewart. In Fonda, perhaps this was born of prairie populism, for Henry Jaynes Fonda began his life in Grand Island, Nebraska (on May 16, 1905), where (many say) the prairie really begins, a diverse market town in a region that gave its political support to the likes of William Jennings Bryan and Mary Ellen Lease. Fonda’s father, a journeyman printer, was of that ilk and took young Henry to Omaha where he witnessed an infamous lynching and. horrified, derived from it another aspect of his politics. Fonda went to college at the U. of Minnesota, aiming to join the newspaper business at the other end, as a reporter, but he was diverted by play-acting, first on the Minneapolis campus and then (in a group calling themselves ‘The University Players’) on Cape Cod. His talents were noticed both on the summer circuit and on Broadway, and in 1935 he got his first big break, starring on film with Janet Gaynor in The Farmer Takes a Wife. I always think of Fonda, though, in his more characteristic role as Mr. Roberts, the rebellious naval Lieutenant (jg) who, aboard the cargo ship Reluctant and sailing “from apathy to tedium” yearns for battle and ‘real’ heroism. Fonda won Broadway’s heart in this role (not to mention a Tony award, 1948, and a very long run. 1948-51) and then took it to Hollywood where, if anything, he and John Ford made it better. ©

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"Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest." Archibald Cox, 1967/.

If family heritage means anything to a child’s life possibilities, then Archibald Cox might likely have defended President Richard Nixon against impeachment charges, for he was the great-grandson of President Andrew Johnson’s defense lawyer, William B. Everts. A quite different path might have been suggested by his uncle, the famed literary editor Maxwell Perkins. But in the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s, fate trumped heritage and Cox played a critical role in Nixon’s downfall. Archibald Cox was born to the American purple on May 17, 1912 in Plainfield, NJ. He attended private schools (the Wardle School and St. Paul’s) and then went on to Harvard College and Harvard Law. He clerked for the famous judge Learned Hand, and then joined a prominent Boston law firm. During WWII, government service sent him on a different course, then into the Harvard Law faculty, in 1960 advisor to the campaign of John Kennedy, and then Kennedy’s solicitor general where he played an important role in civil rights cases. It was, however, his reputation as a mediator that recommended him to Attorney General Elliot Richardson as the man who might be able to handle the impasse over the release of the Watergate Tapes. It was Cox’s refusal to accept Nixon’s suggested “compromise” that led to the “Saturday Night Massacre” (Cox’s dismissal and Richardson’s resignation), then the Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection of Nixon’s case, and (finally) the resignation of the President of the United States of America. ©

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"I didn't aspire to be a good sport; champion was good enough for me." Fred Perry

It is ironic that England, the site of the greatest of the ‘Grand Slam’ tennis tournaments (held annually at the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s home site, Wimbledon) should, generally, have made such a poor showing in world tennis, only rarely landing a player even in the final sixteen, let alone on the championship dais. It was not always so, a fact we were reminded of yearly by the BBC’s lead tennis commentators, Dan Maskell (1908-1992) on TV and Fred Perry on radio, for both of them had been tennis rebels, both working class kids who “went pro” in the 1930s, thus tarring the treasured “amateur” image of England’s snobbiest sport, lawn tennis. They even toured together, for money, in the mid-to-late 1930s. Maskell’s honeyed voice and manner, his long-played role as the ‘pro’ at the All England club (and, by the way, tennis instructor to Elizabeth’s and Philip’s royal children) made his rebellion shorter, but it was not until 1984 that the All England club buried the hatchet, renamed its Somerset Road entrance “The Fred Perry Gate,” and for good measure put up a statue of him in the Centre Court’s rose garden just opposite the holy of holies, the Members’ Enclosure. Fred Perry was born (in Stockport, on May 17, 1909) into a working class family. Fred’s father, a cotton spinner, was a man of some ambition (twice a Labour MP and a leader in the Cooperative movement), and when Fred began to show his great talent (first, by the way, at table tennis!) he indulged his son with enough financial support for Fred to stay amateur. And it was as an amateur that (in 1933 and 1934) English Fred became the best player in the world, winning at Wimbledon, adding the Australian and American titles, and securing a berth as lead player in Britain’s Davis Cup team. In winning, Perry also displayed the kinds of talent that were “unfashionable” in the staid world of English amateur tennis, attacking the net and playing a variety of ‘mean,’ indeed rather lowly, spinning shots. His was a style that didn’t please the establishment. After Fred’s first Wimbledon championship, beating Jack Crawford, he overheard a Member console Crawford by saying “the best man didn’t win today.” As the DNB puts it, “it was like a mongrel winning Crufts.” So when Fred (and of course Maskell) went pro it was indeed a rebellion. Fred’s rebellion went further (commercializing his name in a line of American sportswear) and lasted longer, but perhaps in this we can say that the rebels had the last words, many of them, as the ‘voices’ of the Wimbledon championships. ©.

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"No one can be at peace unless he has his freedom." Malcolm X

In an earlier anniversary note, I noted the effect of the Omaha race riot of 1919 (and the lynching of Will Brown) on the life of actor Henry Fonda. It had a parallel impact on the life of Malcolm Little, born in Omaha six years after the riot, on May 19, 1925. But Henry was white and Malcolm was black, and even without the 1919 riot, Malcolm’s course had been set by his father Eric’s experiences of growing up in Georgia during the rise of Jim Crow. All four of Eric’s brothers, he believed, had been killed by whites, one of them actually lynched, which helps to explain why Eric, a Baptist minister, also became the leader of the Omaha branch of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. But times were tough in Omaha for any black family, especially one associated with the UNIA’s brand of black nationalism. So the Rev’d Earl moved his family to Lansing, Michigan, which (as it turned out) was from the frying pan into the fire, for Lansing was home to the so-called “Black Legion,” an extremist offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, and Malcolm’s father was immediately subjected to death threats. His death, judged a suicide by the Lansing coroner, was always thought by the Littles to have been a murder. Whichever, it set the family on a downwards spiral which included Malcolm’s mother, Louise Helen Little, being placed in a state psychiatric hospital and the Little children scattered into various orphanages and foster homes. Malcolm Little kept in touch with his siblings, especially his sisters (they would free their mother in 1962), but after dropping out of high school he fell into a life of petty crime (drugs, pimping, larceny) and prison sentences. Malcolm had, though, once been a good student, and in prison he found salvation first in reading and then (through the recommendations of his Little siblings) in Islam and a more extreme version of his father’s black nationalism. And it was as Malcolm X, a prophet of the Nation of Islam, that the world came to know him, author of a now-famous autobiography and an eloquent advocate of black racial supremacy. A later conversion experience (to Sunni Islam) gave him another name, Malik el-Shabazz, and a new set of enemies, including the FBI, but it was agents of the Nation of Islam who assassinated Malik el-Shabazz in February 1965. ©

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"The gospel commanded me, when I was persecuted in one country, to fly to another." Elias Neau.

That religious persecution has only generated further persecution is a truth well known to students of Early Modern European and American history, the persecuted Puritans of colonial New England being a well-known case. They fled England to establish their own freedoms, including the right to persecute others. But history also testifies that it need not always be so. Take the case of Elias Neau, a French Huguenot (Calvinist) born on May 20, 1662. His adherence to that faith led to his exile when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and it was as a refugee that he landed in New York. There he continued his seafaring ways, married another Huguenot, and joined New York’s French (Huguenot) church. He did quite well financially, but in 1692 he was captured by a French privateer, taken to France, and when he refused to renounce his Protestantism subjected to a remarkable series of punishments including several years as a galley slave and long periods in French dungeons undergoing various tortures and deprivations. Redeemed by the English at the Peace of Ryswick, Neau spent a year or so traveling Britain and Protestant Europe to raise relief funds for the Huguenots, then returned to New York and to his positions as an elder in the French church and a leading merchant in the town. But Neau’s experiences—as a slave, as a declared heretic, as a prisoner held for months in durance appallingly vile—led him in other directions, too. Most remarkably he secured legislation making it legal to establish a school for the enslaved (Africans and Native Americans), and devoted much of his time there to teaching basic literacy and numeracy, but also providing medical care and prayer sessions to slaves throughout the city, rejecting what he called “the vile conceit that the negroes have no immortal souls.” Neau’s developing theological views led to his excommunication by the French church, and then the slave insurrection of 1712 put his own life at risk. He survived that and for the last ten years of his life continued his dual mission to the enslaved of education and conversion. He died in 1722. His will sought to ensure that his work would continue. In like spirit Neau made no judgments on his persecutors. Still today the American episcopal church annually sets aside a feast day to remember Elias Neau as a “witness to the faith.” But, it must be said, his witness was unusual in its time and place. ©.

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"She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore". Tongue twister jingle said to have been inspired by the life & work of Mary Anning, 1799-1847

The English seaside town of Lyme Regius, Dorset, early became known as a place to test the health and life claims of sea-bathing. Jane Austen visited Lyme Regius twice, in 1803 and 1804, and was charmed enough by it to make it, and its twisted stone steps and alleys, important to the plot of her Persuasion (1817). But Lyme Regius gained fame for other reasons, too. Perhaps, on her visits, Miss Austen heard tales of Lyme Regius’s miracle girl, Mary Anning, a carpenter’s daughter born on May 21, 1799 who, aged only 15 months, was the sole survivor of a lightning strike that carried away three neighbor women. Local lore had it that the lightning bolt transformed little Mary from being a slight, sickly toddler into a vivacious, inquiring female. That is indeed what she became, though the cause was more likely her father’s supplemental trade in finding fossils, cleaning them, and selling them to gentlemen collectors. Now known as the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage site, the Lias cliffs immediately to the east of Lyme Regius’s sand beach are packed with fossils, gradually exposed by erosion, and Mary Anning soon developed a precocious talent at finding them. By the time her father died, when she was just 12, she was in the fossil business herself. Anning became famous for it, and—in the family’s reduced circumstances that followed her father’s death—an object of charity for her gentlemen collectors. Her finds included a complete ichthyosaur, and, later, an even more spectacular set of flying dinosaurs, pterodactyls and that ilk, and Anning herself became a figure of fame, not only because of her discoveries but also her growing skill, through anatomy, at classifying their interrelationships as species. Meanwhile, Mary Anning, a poor woman from a poor family, became well known as an angel of mercy and care for the poor of Lyme Regius. She died in 1847, and among the many recognitions that she received, mostly posthumously (for it was thought that women ought not be scientists), was a memorial window (1850) in the parish church, its four panels depicting six of her acts of corporal charity to the poor people of her town. Mary Anning was, then, not only a precursor of Charles Darwin but also a woman of character and quality, a Congregationalist dissenter turned Anglican saint. ©

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"If you should ever happen to find that picture [by Degas), I know an American who will pay any price for it." Mary Cassatt to Ambroise Vollard, art dealer.

In the 19th century American money, often newly minted, traveled to Europe to take a grand tour, soak up the culture, and engage in affairs of the heart with impecunious aristocrats. In Henry James’s fiction and in real life, “money” was often a young Yankee heiress, not always naive. Jenny Jerome, for instance, bagged a Churchill within a few weeks of landfall, probably deliberately, and the families haggled for months over money. Little Mary Stevenson Cassatt arrived in France in 1855, aged 11 and not looking for a husband. She came from old money (birthed by land, stocks, railroads on May 22, 1844), sailed to Europe already civilized, and polished herself up further by getting right on the ground floor of the impressionist movement. Mary met artists of all sorts at the 1855 Paris World’s Fair and, in the 1860s, chose skilled masters as her mentors. In 1868 she had a canvas accepted by the Salon, and returned to Europe after the Franco-Prussian War determined to make her career as an artist, despite prejudices against women—particularly American heiresses—undertaking such work. When Impressionism burst on the scene in the 1870s she was ready for it, and was invited to join the movement by Edgar Degas, with whom she developed an intimate artistic relationship despite disagreements about politics (she a feminist and friend of the Dreyfus family). She became one of the three “grandes dames” of impressionism, along with Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond. Two of Mary Cassatt’s paintings can be seen in the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park. The Chicago Art Institute has dozens, including sketches. That owes as much to the close personal relationship that developed between Cassatt and Bertha Honoré Palmer (1848-1919), also born on May 22, and a leading Chicago philanthropist. That relationship was all about art, however, and Mary Cassatt’s reputation is secure and still outshines Jenny Churchill’s. Bertha Palmer’s interesting life is another story. ©