Granny

Up above the smoke & cinders & rooftops all the stars, very nicely aligned, seemed to shine down on old New York - boy oh boy, they must have, when lovely, delicate Anna Hall married Elliott, second son of Theo. "Greatheart" Roosevelt. The handsome, charming son - rather unlike his toothy, precocious older brother, Theo. Jr. What a pitiful couple of coconuts they turned out to be.

Young Mrs. Roosevelt gave birth to her only daughter on this day, October 11, 1884. Far off in Missouri, Harry Truman was a round-faced baby. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a blond toddler. Sam'l Clemens aka Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn, his masterpiece, that year. Helen Keller was a fair-faced four-year-old down in Alabama, thrashing around, mystified, still trapped in the dark & the quiet.

Anna Eleanor the Roosevelts named their firstborn. So surprised & disappointed Anna was in how her her child looked. She knew first hand how important it was, in her world, for a girl to be beautiful, but Eleanor, as she was known, wasn't. True, her eyes were beautifully blue, but what an unfortunate mouth she had, poor shy, solemn thing. To her doting drunkard of a father, Eleanor was 'little Nell.' To her sad, chilly mother, Eleanor was 'Granny.' She didn't seem to have much of a future.

If you're reading this, you probably already know that the Roosevelts were never to know how the world would know their valiant daughter, whose birthday it is today.

Sorry girls - he's dead!

So, I was driving yesterday, keeping up w/ the traffic out on I-70 between here & St. Louis, listening to a reading of The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. I was finding a place to park not so very far away at all from the white tents, folding chairs, and meanderers, signifying Clayton's Big Read. Ah, just the place for someone such as I, a tried & true author/illustrator in the old age of her youth, in the childhood of her old age. Walking about, watching a tentful of attendees, there to cheer their young, school-age authors, LEAVE the tent as I was preparing to speak - about what? a book I did back when Bill Clinton was in office. They're Off! The Story of the Pony Express. In the course of a 1/2 hour of VERY lively talking on my part, a few people, on their part, came to listen. Maybe seven, bless 'em. Vaudeville lives. I signed a book and drove home, listening to W. S. M.'s continuing tale of T. P. Veil, the plot of which was significantly changed in the very swell movie by the same name and all the while, shadowed over the entire day & all that happened and did not happen was the knowledge that the day might have been the day when old Boomers such as I would have been marveling that half of the Fab 4 is 70 - can you believe it? John and Ringo are 70 – go figure! But no, the one is still here, and the other was murdered - neither fact changing the fact that the Beatles will always be. don't mean to be such an old dork, but they meant EVERYTHING to my long-gone [gods be thanked] 13-year-old self and to the subsequent various versions . ..

was it a bad day, yesterday, an unusually bad day at Attica for Mark David Chapman, I wonder?

http://www.acepilots.com/wwi/us_rickenbacker.html There's a fine, handsome photo here, along w/a telling of the exploits of Capt Eddie Rickenbacker, birthday guy....

‎"Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared." Aviator Eddie Rickenbacker, b. 8 October, 120 years ago today, on the day after the 41st birthday of 'The Hoosier Poet," James Whitcomb Riley... You'll find many of his writings here:

http://www.jameswhitcombriley.com/

So, I know it doesn't mean all that much right now, today, here in the scramble, the tangle of the multi-faceted present tense, knowing that today's the anniversary of the births of soprano Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum's "Swedish nightingale" (1820) & Geo. Westinghouse, the inventor, in 1846. I'm thinking that I when I cast a backward glance & find out that a pair of long-gone actresses (Carole Lombard & Janet Gaynor) once shared an Oct 6 birthday, back in a vanished world in which audiences would set aside their troubles to sit in the dark together, watching black & silver-white stories gleaming - well, these factoids lend meaning to the day. So here we are, sloshing through the latest in an exceedingly long line of days labeled 6th of October. Souls are stepping through the 6 Oct slot, onto time's conveyor belt, into the bodies of infants, whose dear ones, I hope, will make a cake for them. Some crackpot aunt will note - 'hey, you have the same birthday as Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who built & navigated a seagoing time machine. Isn't that neat? Maybe he was born on a day just like this, except it was in 1914 & everything in Europe had gone to hell, but still...'

"Must swear off from swearing. Bad habit. " Rutherford B. Hayes, who was born 4 Oct, 1822, back when men were digging the Erie Canal. Somehow it's nice to know that I share a bad habit with the 19th President of the United States.

"I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever... and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded." Frederic Remington, who was born 4 Oct. 1861, who painted moonlight and horses better than almost anyone.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/frederic-remington/about-frederic-remington/688/

So, count me among the countless who didn't know that yesterday, 2 Oct, marked the anniversary of the day, 141 years ago, that a noble peacemaker, Mohandas Gandhi was born in India. And on Oct. 2, the Mahatma's 50th birthday, poor old President Wilson got head-whacked, out in Pueblo, Colorado, out campaigning for his nation's becoming part of the League of Nations [no deal], with the stroke that paralyzed him.

As for today, the 3rd of October, 276th day of the year, the tiny wiki-bots tell me that it was on this day in 1955, when I was a delightful 4-year-old, that the Mickey Mouse Club debuted, just a few days after James Dean was killed.

Happy birthday, long-gone, lovely, pretty [Hallmark] artist & art-collector Alice Ann Biggerstaff. Happy day to glorious, lovely, neurotic, brilliant Italian actress, Eleanora Duse, born in 1858.... and to Gore Vidal, b. the year that The Great Gatsby was published.... And oh my, it seems that it was on this day, in 1656. that the old red-headed hot-headed Myles Standish passed away. Hard to imagine almost, that I wrote a book about him once.

And in 1836, just a few months he was visited by Marcus & Narcissa Whitman, Black Hawk, chief of the Sauks, died in prison, in St. Louis. The Whitmans were newlyweds, Oregon Trail pioneers, and missionaries, on their way to the West & being future massacre victims/ I wrote a book about them, too. It's Woody Guthrie's deathday, too. 1967. Bless 'im. I was a miserable high school sophomore then.

So, I surely did mean to write yesterday, Jimmy Carter's 86th birthday. It was the 1st of October, and had I not gotten all involved in revising a manuscript about stubborn Mary Walker, I would have written if only to note that poor old lost & wild Bonnie Parker might have had 100 candles on her birthday cake last night, in some ratty old folks home in Texas, had she not taken up with bad company... had she not been born into such a mean, dusty world.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5061/

and now it's the 2nd of October. funny how time keeps cranking away