17 December

So, m'dears, we've come through a painful and sorrowful weekend from which I escaped into a Downton Abbey marathon on PBS. That and drawing, painting a piece for my proposed Laura Ingalls Wilder calendar, for 2014, should our world be around that long.  For now, I invite you to check out my monthly post on a splendid group blog, I.N.K. This link, Interesting Nonfiction for Kids  will take you to www.inkthinktank.com, which grew out of the blog, where you will find such remarkable authors as Jim Murphy, Vicki Cobb, and Deborah Heiligman.

John Greenleaf Whittier, whose bow tie is wonderful

As for today's birthday dudes & dudettes, I'll just note the English chemist, Humphry Davy, b. 17 Dec. 1778, and Victorian poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, b. this day in 1807. Considering recent happenings, here's an apt quote of his: 
    "For all sad words of tongue and pen,
     The saddest are these, 'It might have been.'

Women's History Month No. 9

"It was difficult, later, to think of a time when Betsy and Tacy had not been friends." Maud Hart Lovelace (1892 ~ 1980)

So, I have to write a bit about Mrs. Lovelace, whose name is like a Valentine, whose Betsy-Tacy books got me through many an otherwise cheerless day back when I was a dorky kid. My cousin and I both had sad moms & tense homes. We both agreed that the Betsy-Tacy books and the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder were our happy childhoods.

The series is set between the years 1897 and 1917, but I'm telling you that these are not just sweetie-nostalgia-clip-clop books. If you are looking for excellent books with terrific, fun-loving girl characters, if you are a fan of Meet Me in St. Louis, DO check out Maud's mostly autobiographical books about her young days in Mankato, a.k.a. Deep Valley, Minnesota. There it was that Maud Hart (Betsy Ray) became best friends with Frances "Bick" Kinney (Tacy - short for Anastasia - Kelly of the red ringlets).

If you do, you might find yourself wanting to find kindred spirits in the Betsy-Tacy Society and/or the Maud Hart Lovelace Society.

Why are there two fan organizations? Oh man, don't even ask. I will tell you that I got to talk to Mrs. Lovelace, got her phone number at the library, called her up and bless her heart, Mrs. Lovelace was perfectly nice about it when I was so goofy and too awe-struck to be sensible on the phone. She passed away not so very long afterwards - I have to believe this was mere coincidence as she was quite elderly - and went to heaven to be with Tacy and Tib and her beloved Joe (dreamboat author Delos Lovelace), Mama, Papa, and Margaret. But they're all ever young in those delightful books, blessed be.

celebration

So. The sun has gone down and the 7th of February, the 200th anniversary of the day that Charles Dickens launched his life of troubles & glory; the 145th anniversary of the birth of Laura Ingalls [must've been mighty chilly in that little h. in the big w.] is nearly over and how did I celebrate it? Well, I read a bit of A Tale of Two Cities on my Kindle whilst waiting at the local post office. Does that count?

No. I didn't think so. But I've thought about this pair of writers, who brought so much richness to the world, all day long.

Laura's Prairie Rose

So, okay, according to what I know about her, Laura & Almanzo Wilder's daughter Rose was altogether as headstrong as her parents. Her mom, in particular. She was born up in Dakota 125 years ago today. Being a deep-dyed fan of Mrs. Wilder's books, I cannot but be fascinated with Rose Wilder, without whose editorial assistance & advice, her mother's would never have been published to such acclaim, read with such pleasure. Reverence even.

I love knowing, thanks to my friend Bill Anderson (justly admired biographer of LIW & knowledgeable in all things Ingalls/Wilder) that journalist Rose & her good friend "Troub" (Helen Dore Boylston, nurse/WWI vet/author of the delightful series of Sue Barton books) traveled about Europe together after the Great War. That she & Rose took LIW all the way west on Route 66 to California in roundabout 1927. Ah well. Rose Wilder Lane. God rest her. Serious needleworking Libertarian dame.

And she shares a birthday w/ Walt Disney [1901], Gen. Geo. Armstrong Custer [1839], 8th President Martin Van Buren [1782],sappy romantic poet Christina Rossetti [1830]. So much for astrology.

Summer of '74

Someday he'd be known as the "Mad Monk." Someday he'd help to bring down the Romanovs, but in 1874, Grigori Rasputin was a 5-year-old peasant boy out in Siberia. Theo. Roosevelt, future President, was 16, an avid amateur taxidermist. Ex-president Millard Fillmore kicked the bucket that year, the year Laura Ingalls turned seven. Sam'l Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was working on a ms. , "the Adventures of Tom Sawyer," and a group of genteel renegades were experimenting with the painting of light, light spilling out of the heavens onto haystacks or the facades of churches or gatherings of Parisians. The light of a sunrise, light and shadow dappling water and the French countryside.

It was in the summer of that year that an elephant was sent out to stroll from Missouri over to Illinois. Folks figured that if James Eads' remarkable new bridge could manage an elephant, then it ought to be safe enough carry a multitude of trains over the Mississippi River and so it has, all these years.

There was a White House wedding that year: President Grant, who'd weathered warfare at its most gruesome, wept as his only daughter got married in May. Nellie Grant would have cried too, had she known what a bum she was marrying, but ah well. Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Shackleton were newborns that year. So was Guglielmo Marconi and before the year was over, the beautiful Jennie Jerome Churchill would give birth to the future Prime Minister of England.

Here now I've taken the scenic route to get to what I thought was well worth noting: baby Herbert Hoover was born on this day, the 10th of August, in 1874. Years ago when I was working on my presidential book Ghosts of the White House, I'd studied a bit about all of the gents who'd lived within those stone walls - or, in the case of Geo. Washington, merely visited, on the 14th of March, 1797, I believe. What a remarkable fellow Hoover was, I thought at the time, I think when I'd come across a photo of him as a young man, hale and blond and brilliant. uff da!

"He was," I wrote in Gs of the W.H., "a rich mining engineer who, during the First World War, organized a campaign to get food to [starving, wretched] people behind enemy lines. How could a brilliant, big-hearted hero like Herbert Hoover seem so helpless?" So "gloomy and uncertain." Sigh. I discovered later on, much, much later on that old Herbert Hoover was here in town, on the day I turned six years old. Harry Truman, who'd befriended HH, invited him here to Independence. All I knew was that I'd gotten the Tiny Tears doll I'd very much wanted for a birthday present. Ah well.

So, I dressed myself in my calico gown last Tuesday morning (the 22nd of June, 2nd day of summer, 104th anniversary of the day that Billy Wilder & Anne Morrow Lindbergh were born), and headed off to SE Kansas the other day. I set out from one Independence to another, down where the storied Ingalls family lived some 140 years ago. I confess that my scuffed-up heart fluttered at the sight of the Verdigris River, only because my 8-year-old self learned about it in Mrs. Wilder's L. H. on the P. One of the best parts of doing my books over the years has been getting to visit places of which I'd read. When I was researching for my Lincoln books, you'd better know that my heart skipped when I sped past a sign on a freeway bridge reading Sangamon County. I'd come into that lanky man's home country.

Out in the shade behind the replica of THE L. H. on the P. I had the pleasure of visiting with some kindred spirits from India, Pennsylvania and Japan. Their admiration of L.I.W., who'd been a skippy little brown-haired girl right thereabouts, had brought them, by way of a tour arranged by Barbara and George Hawkins. http://lhsitetours.homestead.com/ And don't think I didn't tip my hat to gritty commerce and mention my L.I.W. Coloring Book, available in the gift shop.

Home again, by way of Fort Scott, Kansas, and off again to Burr Oak, Iowa, for Laura Days. The Ingallses lived there too, in that beautiful, green and rolling country up by the Minnesota line for a little while, around 1876, the Centennial Year. It was in the summer of that year (June 25), when that horrid battle went down at Little Big Horn, Montana. I've been gallivanting rather than writing about inspiring pulpit-pounder Henry Ward Beecher, who was born June 24, 1813, or the anniversaries of the U.N. Charter or the Korean invasion or the 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo or Helen Keller's and Pearl Buck's birthdays and old Senator Byrd's deathday and so the summer steams on and the big wheel keeps on turning. Did I tell you that tomorrow tomorrow makes 91 years since .... never mind. It's time to think of today.

Laura

Sometime on this day, April 10, or the next, back in 1962, my 11-year-old self was given the privilege of naming my new sister. I'm pretty sure I let the folks know I wasn't too happy about the prospect of a brand new bawly baby around the place, as you know if you read my somewhat autobiographical novel Just for You to Know [HarperCollins, 2006, recently reprinted - by me, i.e. Time Pie Press - in paperback because it's really good & I couldn't let it just vanish like a snowball in July, could I? No! – see www.cherylharness.com].

I'd been the only girl. In fact, despite my trio of little brothers, I did my best to be an only child. I comforted myself by reading about nice families, i.e. those to be found in books, particularly those written by the great Missouri author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957). My cousin Myrna and I agreed that, for us (both daughters of sad, dysfunctional,who'd have been ever so much more cheerful and organized if they'd never procreated), our happy childhoods existed only in the adventures of the Ingalls and in Maud Hart Lovelace's book about Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly. www.betsy-tacysociety.org

So it is that my sister's name is Laura. She would have been Laura Ingalls Harness, my our folks insisted on Jeanne for her middle name. And Jeannie is how she was known, beautiful, rosy, girl-baby with a cloud of curly dark hair. So jealous I was, dishwater-blond dork that I was, that I could have spit and I did, but not on the baby.

She shares a birthday with old Commodore Matthew Perry (1794), Lew Wallace (1827; author of Ben-Hur), snarky-brilliant Clare Boothe Luce (1903), and dashing Omar Sharif (oohbaybee). And she goes by Laura these days, my sister does, my best friend. Amazing how the calendar fixes everything.