Dang!

"I'm just a lucky slob from [Cadiz] Ohio who happened to be in the right place at the right time."

Wm. Clark Gable (1901-1960)
Some slob. I meant to post something here yesterday, it being the first of the month & Clark Gable's 111th birthday & all. I really, really did, but life & work intervened. I might have waxed on about how marvelous he was in "San Francisco" and even more so in "Idiot's Delight." About the glorious cinema moment when he makes his first appearance in GWTW - at the bottom of the staircase @ the Wilkes's. In 1939, when pretty much all of Europe was going to hell.

And of course, yesterday was the anniversary of Langston Hughes.

"We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line."

"Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."

James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

A good person would have written about Mr. Hughes on his birthday, never mind it being the first day of good old Black History Month. But as I say, I didn't get around to it, being preoccupied with illustrations, with finding out that the direction of the book I'm illustrating is taking a different direction and getting mad & flustered & taking a nap & fussing w/dwgs for Laura Ingalls Wilder notecards instead & anyway, Langston Hughes is, as is many another valiant African American, ever so much more than some BHM icon. In any event, now it's the 2nd of February and the 100th anniversary (!!!) of the birth of Elizabeth Gladys Millvina Dean (2 Feb 1912-31 May 2009), who was a round-cheeked babe in her mother's arms when her folks & her older brother, Bertram, boarded HMS Titanic, bound for a new life in America. Alas.

God rest her & Clark & Langston, too, at safe harbor in the bright City of the Dead.