This week I’ll be on hiatus, check out Monday’s episode, December 2nd for the whole scoop!

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Lewis Carroll  

The sun was shining on the sea,

   Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

   The billows smooth and bright—

And this was odd, because it was

   The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,

   Because she thought the sun

Had got no business to be there

   After the day was done—

"It's very rude of him," she said,

   "To come and spoil the fun!"

The sea was wet as wet could be,

   The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a cloud because

   No cloud was in the sky:

No birds were flying overhead—

   There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

   Were walking close at hand:

They wept like anything to see

   Such quantities of sand:

"If this were only cleared away,"

   They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops

   Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose," the Walrus said,

   "That they could get it clear?"

"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,

   And shed a bitter tear.

"0 Oysters, come and walk with us!"

   The Walrus did beseech.

"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

   Along the briny beach:

We cannot do with more than four,

   To give a hand to each."

The eldest Oyster looked at him,

   But never a word he said;

The eldest Oyster winked his eye,

   And shook his heavy head—

Meaning to say he did not choose

   To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,

   All eager for the treat:

Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,

   Their shoes were clean and neat—

And this was odd, because, you know,

   They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,

   And yet another four;

And thick and fast they came at last,

   And more and more and more—

All hopping through the frothy waves,

   And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

   Walked on a mile or so,

And then they rested on a rock

   Conveniently low:

And all the little Oysters stood

   And waited in a row.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

   "To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

   Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

   And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,

   "Before we have our chat;

For some of us are out of breath,

   And all of us are fat!"

"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.

   They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,

   "Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

   Are very good indeed—

Now, if you're ready, Oysters dear,

   We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,

   Turning a little blue.

"After such kindness, that would be

   A dismal thing to do!"

"The night is fine," the Walrus said,

   "Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind of you to come!

   And you are very nice!"

The Carpenter said nothing but

   "Cut us another slice.

I wish you were not quite so deaf—

   I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,

   "To play them such a trick.

After we've brought them out so far,

   And made them trot so quick!"

The Carpenter said nothing but

   "The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:

   "I deeply sympathize."

With sobs and tears he sorted out

   Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

   Before his streaming eyes.

"O, Oysters," said the Carpenter,

   "You've had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?"

   But answer came there none—

And this was scarcely odd, because

   They'd eaten every one.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

The date is December 3rd, Tuesday, and today I’m coming to you from Auckland, New Zealand. 

This week I’ll be on hiatus, check out Monday’s episode, December 2nd for the whole scoop!

Legend of The Indian Summer

Kate Harrington

I have learned a simple legend,

Never found in books of lore,

Copied not from old tradition,

Nor from classics read of yore ;

But the breezes sang it to me

With a low and soft refrain,

While the golden leaves and scarlet

Fluttered down to catch the strain.

And the grand old trees above me,

As their stately branches swayed,

Threw across my couch of crimson

More of sunlight than of shade.

I had lain there dreaming, musing

On the summer's vanished bloom,

Wondering if each penciled leaflet

Did not mark some flow'ret's tomb ;

Thinking how each tree could tell me

Many a tale of warrior's fame;

Gazing at the sky, and asking

How the ''Indian Summer' came.

Then methought a whispered cadence

Stole from out the haunted trees,

While the leaves kept dropping, dropping,

To the music of the breeze.

“I will tell thee,” said the whisper,

“What I've learned from Nature's book;

For the sunbeams wrote this legend

On the margin of a brook.

“'Tis about an Indian maiden,

She the star-flower of her race,

With a heart whose soft emotions

Rippled through her soul-lit face.

“All her tribe did homage to her,

For her father was their chief;

He was stern, and she forgiving,—

He brought pain, and she relief.

“And they called him 'Indian Winter,'

All his actions were so cold ;

Her they named the 'Indian Summer,'

For she seemed a thread of gold

“Flashing through her native forest,

Beaming in the wigwam lone,

Singing to the birds, her playmates,

Till they warbled back her tone.

“When the summer days were ended,

And the chilling months drew near,

When the clouds hung, dull and leaden,

And the leaves fell, brown and sere,

“Brought they to the chieftain's presence

One, a ‘pale-face,’ young and brave,

But whom youth nor manly valor

Could from savage vengeance save.

“‘Bring him forth!’ in tones of thunder

Thus the 'Indian Winter' cried,

While the gentle ' Indian Summer'

Softly flitted to his side.

'When the tomahawk was lifted,

And the scalping-knife gleamed high,

Pride, revenge, and bloody hatred

Glared within the warrior's eye;

'And the frown upon his forehead

Darker, deeper, sterner grew ;

While the lowering clouds above them

Hid the face of heaven from view.

''Spare him ! oh, my father, spare him!'

Friend and foe were thrust apart,

While the golden thread of sunlight

Twined around the red man's heart.

'And her eye was full of pity,

And her voice was full of love,

As she told him of the wigwam

On the hunting-ground above,

'Where great Manito was talking,—

She could hear him in the breeze ;

How he called the ' pale-face' brother—

Smoked with him the pipe of peace.

'Then the warrior's heart relented,

And the glittering weapon fell: 

For the maiden's sake,' he muttered,

'Thou art pardoned,— fare thee well!'

' And the sun, that would have slumbered

Till the spring-time came again,

Earthward from his garnered brightness

Threw a flood of golden rain;

'And the 'Indian Summer' saw it,

She, the gentle forest child ;

And to ' Indian Winter' whispered,

See how Manito has smiled !'

'All the tribe received the omen,

And they called it by her name:

Indian Summer, Indian Summer,

It will ever be the same.

'Though the ' pale-face' gave another

To the lovely maid he won,

Nature still receives her tribute

From the wigwam of the sun.

' Here, alone, this shining symbol

Gilds the streamlet, warms the sod,

For no Indian Summer cometh

Save where Indian feet have trod.'

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

This week I’ll be on hiatus, which may sound ridiculous considering the number of episodes I have to catch up on, but if you then consider that each episode takes me about 3 hours from research to writing to publication, I need time, that with working, I don’t always have. 

So this hiatus week will be a recurring thing I do to help me stay on top of episodes while I figure out how to produce them faster (!). And each week I’ll share some content I couldn’t otherwise share on here. This week I’ll be sharing poems that I think are quite delightful and quirky but that would otherwise be too long for a regular episode. Future hiatus weeks may be something different! Stayed tuned. 

So without further ado….

The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo

Edward Lear

On the Coast of Coromandel

   Where the early pumpkins blow,

      In the middle of the woods

   Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

Two old chairs, and half a candle,

One old jug without a handle--

      These were all his worldly goods,

      In the middle of the woods,

      These were all his worldly goods,

   Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,

   Of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bo.

Once, among the Bong-trees walking

   Where the early pumpkins blow,

      To a little heap of stones

   Came the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

There he heard a Lady talking,

To some milk-white Hens of Dorking--

      "'Tis the Lady Jingly Jones!

      On that little heap of stones

      Sits the Lady Jingly Jones!"

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

"Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!

   Sitting where the pumpkins blow,

      Will you come and be my wife?"

   Said the Yongby-Bonghy-Bo.

"I am tired of living singly--

On this coast so wild and shingly--

      I'm a-weary of my life;

      If you'll come and be my wife,

      Quite serene would be my life!"

   Said the Yonghy-Bongby-Bo,

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

"On this Coast of Coromandel

   Shrimps and watercresses grow,

      Prawns are plentiful and cheap,"

Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

"You shall have my chairs and candle,

And my jug without a handle!

      Gaze upon the rolling deep

      (Fish is plentiful and cheap);

      As the sea, my love is deep!"

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

Lady Jingly answered sadly,

   And her tears began to flow--

      "Your proposal comes too late,

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

I would be your wife most gladly!"

(Here she twirled her fingers madly)

      "But in England I've a mate!

      Yes! you've asked me far too late,

      For in England I've a mate,

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

   Mr. Yongby-Bonghy-Bo!

"Mr. Jones (his name is Handel--

   Handel Jones, Esquire, & Co.)

      Dorking fowls delights to send

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

Keep, oh, keep your chairs and candle,

And your jug without a handle--

      I can merely be your friend!

      Should my Jones more Dorkings send,

      I will give you three, my friend!

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

"Though you've such a tiny body,

   And your head so large doth grow--

      Though your hat may blow away

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

Though you're such a Hoddy Doddy,

Yet I wish that I could modi-

      fy the words I needs must say!

      will you please to go away

      That is all I have to say,

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!

   Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!"

Down the slippery slopes of Myrtle,

   Where the early pumpkins blow,

      To the calm and silent sea

   Fled the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

There, beyond the Bay of Gurtle,

Lay a large and lively Turtle.

      "You're the Cove," he said, "for me;

      On your back beyond the sea,

      Turtle, you shall carry me!"

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,

   Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

Through the silent-roaring ocean

   Did the Turtle swiftly go;

      Holding fast upon his shell

   Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

With a sad primeval motion

Towards the sunset isles of Boshen

      Still the Turtle bore him well.

      Holding fast upon his shell,

      "Lady Jingly Jones, farewell!"

   Sang the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,

   Sang the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

From the Coast of Coromandel

   Did that Lady never go;

      On that heap of stones she mourns

   For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

On that Coast of Coromandel,

In his jug without a handle

      Still she weeps, and daily moans;

      On that little heap of stones

      To her Dorking Hens she moans,

   For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,

   For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

And today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, American writer. 

Louisa May was born to a small family in 1832 in what is now Philadelphia, PA. They didn’t stay long there. The family would move to Boston shortly following Dad’s dream of founding a Transcendentalist school. The family would move 22 times in 30 years, mostly in and around New England. 

While Alcott’s father was a man of high-minded ideals, he was not a man of high income. From a young age Louisa May had to work to supplement the family’s income. She, her mother and sisters worked in a variety of domestic roles from governesses to seamstresses. 

Her father’s transcendentalist ideas did allow him to circulate with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and meant he placed a strong emphasis on reading and philosophy. At one point the family corresponded with Frederick Douglass while a housing a fugitive slave as part of the Underground Railroad. 

At age 27, Alcott began more seriously, a writing career. She started writing for The Atlantic Monthly, and, after a spell as a nurse in the Civil War— Alcott was a passionate abolitionist— and then as a patient from becoming deathly ill, her writing career took off. She published Hospital Sketches and Moods, both of which were well received for their humor and candor. She took on the pen name A. M. Barnard to publish more adventure-driven stories.

When Alcott’s classic Little Women first appeared in 1868, Alcott was skeptical it would be reviewed favorably—perhaps because she was concerned at how close it was to an autobiography. But it did well enough to have three sequels which followed the “little women” from adolescence to adulthood with their own kids: Good Wives, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys. 

One of Alcotts childhood homes in Massachusetts is now a museum dedicated to the Alcott family legacy, and Lousia May Alcott was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame 1996. 

Today is the birthday of Ann Dunham, American anthropologist. 

Dunham was born in Kansas, but became an island girl when she followed her parents in moving to Hawaii. While a student at the new University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Dunham met an intelligent, independent man from Kenya named Barack Obama. The two, Dunham 18 and Obama 23, fell for each other and married, against the wishes of their parents, despite the fact that Ann Dunham Obama was already 3 months pregnant. 

Dunham-Obama gave birth to Barack Obama II in August 1961 and was in classes the next semester, this time at the University of Washington in Seattle. Obama, Sr remained in Hawaii working in his original course of study. He departed for Harvard not long after that, Dunham raising little Obama in Hawaii with the help of her parents. Little did she know that her bundle of joy, who she would sometimes take with her to classes, would one day become that Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. 

In addition to being a mother, Ann Dunham was an anthropologist who found her calling studying and aiding women of Indonesia. She lived in Jakarta with her second husband and 6-year-old Barack for a number of years before returning to Hawaii to begin work on a PhD, partially funded by a grant from The Asia Foundation. She would return again to Indonesia many times, a champion for women in rural communities and starting one of the early microcredit programs in Indonesia. 

Lullaby

Louisa May Alcott

Now the day is done, 

Now the shepherd sun 

Drives his white flocks from the sky; 

Now the flowers rest 

On their mother's breast, 

Hushed by her low lullaby. 

Now the glowworms glance, 

Now the fireflies dance, 

Under fern-boughs green and high; 

And the western breeze 

To the forest trees 

Chants a tuneful lullaby. 

Now 'mid shadows deep 

Falls blessed sleep, 

Like dew from the summer sky; 

And the whole earth dreams, 

In the moon's soft beams, 

While night breathes a lullaby. 

Now, birdlings, rest, 

In your wind-rocked nest, 

Unscared by the owl's shrill cry; 

For with folded wings 

Little Brier swings, 

And singeth your lullaby.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend.

Today is Thanksgiving in America. It is a time for families and friends gather together to share a meal and spend the day reflecting on all the wonderful things, tangible and intangible, that have come our way over the past year.

So today I will just share a poem :) 

Thanksgiving

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We walk on starry fields of white
    And do not see the daisies;
 For blessings common in our sight
    We rarely offer praises.
 We sigh for some supreme delight
    To crown our lives with splendor,
 And quite ignore our daily store
    Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
    Upon our thought and feeling.
 They hand about us all the day,
    Our time from pleasure stealing.
 So unobtrusive many a joy
    We pass by and forget it,
 But worry strives to own our lives,
    And conquers if we let it.

There’s not a day in all the year
    But holds some hidden pleasure,
 And looking back, joys oft appear
    To brim the past’s wide measure.
 But blessings are like friends, I hold,
    Who love and labor near us.

We ought to raise our notes of praise
    While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
    Of worry or of trouble;
 Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
    Who knows the mask is double.

But he who has the faith and strength
    To thank his God for sorrow
 Has found a joy without alloy
    To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
    Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
 The hours and days a silent phrase
    Of music we are living.

And so the theme should swell and grow
    As weeks and months pass o’er us,
 And rise sublime at this good time,
    A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely Thanksgiving. 

Today is the birthday of Fanny Kemble, British actress and writer. 

Fanny was born to an acting dynasty in 1809 and as such received her education in Paris in music and theater as a child, branching out to study literature and poetry in her teen years. 

She returned to London and set to work writing her own plays while performing in nearly all of Shakespeare’s classics on London stages, quickly becoming a favorite for her charm and good looks as well as her talent as a playwright. Although acting wasn’t her favorite, she was obviously talented, and it brought in a salary that she couldn’t refuse. 

While on an acting tour in America she met and fell in love with Pierce Butler. The couple lived in Philadelphia and had two daughters. But the marriage would not end well. Butler inherited massive plantations in the South from his grandfather not long into the marriage. Butler would travel South to oversee the plantations, leaving Fanny and the girls behind, perhaps already aware of Fanny’s abolitionist sentiments. Begrudgingly Butler took the whole family to Georgia in the winter of 1838, where Fanny was appalled to see the reality of slavery. The marriage quickly devolved, Butler growing abusive after being confronted with his own sins and a few cases of obvious infidelity. 

Kemble was finally able to separate from Butler in 1847. She made a living by turning to her writing and performing again at the theater circuits in America. She was forbidden to see her daughters who were in the care of their father. 

No longer under the control and abuse of her husband, Kemble wholeheartedly took up the abolitionist cause, publishing, most famously, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, about, of course, that fateful winter she spent in Georgia on her husband’s plantations. The text was taken up by abolitionist circuits as more ammo for their cause.  

She wrote a few additional plays, over ten memoirs regarding different times of her life, a collection of poetry, and translations of French plays. She returned to London, following a daughter who had married a British man. She passed away in 1893 at the age of 84. 

And today is the birthday of Bruce Lee, Chinese- American actor and martial artist. 

Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, the son of a well-known Opera singer and heiress, though he spent his childhood in Hong Kong. After getting in an increasing number of street fights, some with persons in organized crime, his parents feared for his safety, though, he seemed to be winning a large number of the fights, thanks to his martial arts training. His parents sent him to America to finish his education.

A few years into studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, Lee moved to Oakland where he opened his second martial arts studio with a buddy, and opened its doors to all people, much to the chagrin of other Chinese residents. Becoming a prominent figure in the booming Bay Area, Lee began to venture into a more public sphere with live fights, and he landed a role in the 1966 television series The Green Hornet. Lee had studied drama during his time at University and had a good amount of experience from acting roles as a child and teen in Hong Kong. 

Bruce Lee is credited with elevating the image of Asians in America through his roles and public persona. He starred in eight feature films and either starred or was a guest in eight television series. Bruce Lee passed away unexpectedly at the age of 33 from a swollen brain, deemed to be the cause of a bad combination of painkillers. His legacy as the first big Asian American actor lives on. 

A Wish 

Fanny Kemble

Let me not die for ever when I’m laid

   In the cold earth! but let my memory

Live still among ye, like the evening shade,

   That o’er the sinking day steals placidly.

Let me not be forgotten! though the knell

   Has tolled for me its solemn lullaby;

Let me not be forgotten! though I dwell

   For ever now in death’s obscurity.

Yet oh! upon the emblazoned leaf of fame,

   Trace not a record, not a line for me,

But let the lips I loved oft breathe my name,

   And in your hearts enshrine my memory!

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

The date is November 26th, Tuesday, and today I’m coming to you from Port Vila, Vanuatu.

Today is the birthday of Charles M. Schulz, American cartoonist. 

Charles Schulz had been working on his Li’l Folks cartoon for a few years before Peanuts evolved from it. Li’l Folks started out as a mostly one-panel comic and was featured in the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper for about three years before they cut ties. During that time Schulz did a few one-panel comics for The Saturday Evening Post. 

With that credit and his experience at his local paper, he was able to strike a deal with United Feature Syndicate, a comic syndicating company. Under the new name Peanuts, Schulz comic was first published in 7 newspapers on October 2nd, 1950. It took a bit to catch on, but by the 1960s, Peanuts was a hit and had its first animated performance in a Christmas special titled “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is still shown on NBC in December. After its premiere in 1965 it won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. 

In all Schulz wrote over 17,500 strips, rarely taking off even a single day. The merchandising of Peanuts became a source of intense wealth for Schulz, so that he was bringing in about $30 million annually from product sales, licensing, and endorsement deals. When the ice skating rink near his home in California shut down, he and his wife bought it and kept it going. 

Not keen on the business side of things, Schulz kept his focus on creating, hiring others to manage contracts and monetary affairs. In 1997, Schulz took a mandatory five weeks off for his 75th birthday - it was the only time during his life that Peanuts comics were “re-run.”  

Schulz was honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as well as a Congressional Gold Medal and various additional awards from the cartoon and comic community. He passed away in February 2000. 

And today is the birthday of Mary Edwards Walker, American surgeon and activist.

Mary Walker was a force to be reckoned with. Born in 1832 to a large family, Mary’s parents instilled in her a fierce independence and encouraged her to continually question gender and societal norms. In keeping with her family’s belief in equality and curiosity, Mary’s parents made sure their six girls and one boy received equal education. Since there were very few schools nearby, the Walkers started their own. 

Mary quickly gained a fascination with medicine after discovering a number of anatomy and physiology textbooks in her father’s possession. She attended Syracuse Medical School, paying her own way after saving up from working as a teacher. She was the only woman to graduate in the class of 1855. 

At the onset of the Civil War, Walker offered her skills as a surgeon to the US Army. Concerned that she was a woman, they declined, but offer her a position as a nurse, which Walker promptly rejected. Walker joined a civilian volunteer group as a surgeon instead. 

During the American Civil War, Walker was famously captured as she crossed enemy lines to treat wounded soldiers on the battlefield. She wore men’s clothing as was her mode of late, finding them easier to move around in and perform tasks in. From an early age her mother and father had endorsed wearing clothes that were functional, rather than gendered. Her mother had ranted to her children about the restrictiveness of corsets as well as the physical strain they put on the body.  

As a prisoner of war, she helped a confederate surgeon with an amputation before being sent to Castle Thunder. She was part of a prisoner exchange in 1864, just under a year before the war’s end. 

For her heroism she received a Medal of Honor after the war. She remains the only woman to receive the honor, which is the highest and most prestigious military decoration.

Acrostic

Lewis Carroll

Little maidens, when you look

On this little story-book,

Reading with attentive eye

Its enticing history,

Never think that hours of play

Are your only HOLIDAY,

And that in a HOUSE of joy

Lessons serve but to annoy:

If in any HOUSE you find

Children of a gentle mind,

Each the others pleasing ever—

Each the others vexing never—

Daily work and pastime daily

In their order taking gaily—

Then be very sure that they

Have a life of HOLIDAY.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

The date is November 25th, Monday, and today I’m coming to you from Port Vila, Vanuatu.

On this day in 1947, Hollywood studios in Los Angeles California instituted the first blacklist. Ten writers and directors under suspicion of communist sympathies were all fired from their respective posts and movie and TV studios were instructed not to hire them. The Hollywood Ten as they are known were requested to testify in front of the House of Un-American Activities. On the whole, the Ten believed the entire situation to be a witch-hunt by paranoid John McCarthy followers. Their “trial” was a clear demonstration of power on the part of the US Government, though the ordeal is rather hypocritical in light of first amendment rights which protect freedom of speech, including artistic expression.  

The practice of blacklisting artists - including actors - continued into the 1960s. 

And on this day in 1975, Suriname gained its independence from the Netherlands.

Suriname is located on the northern coast of South America and is the smallest country by land mass on the continent. Its population is an estimated 580,000 with the majority of people living in the northern half of the country. The climate is tropical and the plant life is lush, so it’s perhaps no wonder that European trading companies immediately set to work developing plantations and creating an agrarian economy. 

Suriname unfortunately, then became a center of slave exploitation. Primarily controlled by the Netherlands, slaves were shipped in from Africa, the East Indies, and India. To this day, Suriname is one of the most ethnically diverse countries. 

Suriname has struggled with corruption in government for decades although high literacy rates are a sign of improvement. Democracy was restored in the early 2000s, though current president Dési Bouterse has a questionable history, involving military dictatorship in the 1980s. The next elections in Suriname will be held in 2020. 

Tourism is indeed a part of the Suriname economy. The country is home to an extraordinary set of flora and fauna, as well as natural beauty like towering waterfalls, thanks to encompassing part of the Amazon rainforest. The interior of the country is said to be a birdwatcher's paradise. 

And today is the birthday of Kate Gleason, American businesswoman, engineer, and philanthropist. 

Kate Gleason was just shy of 12 when her father began training her as his assistant. Her step-brother had tragically died of typhoid fever leaving a void in her father’s heart as well as his gear-making company. Kate stayed by his side at the company, Gleason Works, for nearly 7 years, leaving at age 18 to enrolled at Cornell University’s engineering school, one of the first women to do so. 

Gleason was soon back by her father’s side though. She had become an integral part of management and development and Gleason Works didn’t last more than a semester without her. Kate Gleason went back to work and enrolled at the nearby Mechanics Institute, today Rochester Institute of Technology. 

Gleason took on increasing responsibility in the company and even ventured overseas to make sales in Europe, making Gleason Works one of the first American manufacturing companies to expand globally. 

Gleason left Gleason Works at age 47 and began to explore other fields. She got into construction and took on various building projects, in Rochester, South Carolina, and California. 

When she passed away in 1933, she left the majority of her $1.4 million estate (about $27 million in today’s dollars) to institutions in and around Rochester, NY, including her alma mater the Rochester Institute of Technology and the main Rochester Public Library. In turn RIT named their engineering departments the Kate Gleason College of Engineering and the Library’s main auditorium also bears her name. 

The Cherry Trees

Edward Thomas 

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding

On the old road where all that passed are dead,

Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding

This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

The date is November 22nd, Friday, and today I’m coming to you from Port Vila, Vanuatu.

On this day in 1995, Toy Story premiered in theaters. 

Toy Story was the first feature-length film created completely using computer-generated imagery. It took around 5 years and $30 million to make. It was a worthy investment as Toy Story grossed nearly $380 million at the box office worldwide, was nominated for three Academy Awards and two Golden Globes, and launched a franchise of related merchandise, video games, and sequels. The most recent sequel, Toy Story 4, came out in June 2019 and grossed $1 billion at the box office. 

And today is the birthday of George Eliot, English writer. 

Of course many listeners will know that George Eliot is a pen name - the writer’s true identity was Mary Ann Evans. 

As a young child, Mary Ann Evans was declared unpretty. She did possess obvious smarts though, and so her father sent her to a boarding school in the hopes that she could develop her brains to make up for her lack of beauty. The amount of formal schooling she received was unusual for a country girl in the first half of the 1800s. 

George Eliot returned from school around 16 to take care of the home after her mother’s death. She continued reading voraciously and corresponded via letters with her former teacher. 

Still unmarried at age 21, George Eliot followed her father in his move to a town near the larger-sized Coventry, where she became friends with a well-connected couple, and started to mix with the intelligentsia of the town. When Eliot’s father passed away in 1849, it was if she was newly liberated. 

Eliot subsequently took a trip to mainland Europe with close friends of her and stayed in Geneva for a spell. Upon her return to England she relocated to London, taking up a position as an editor at a couple literary magazines as she continued to write on her own. While an editor she made up her mind to write novels, perhaps to fill a hole in what she saw as “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” 

Partly to keep her writing career separate from her editing career, and also to escape public scrutiny, Mary Ann Evans published all her novels as George Eliot. At the time, Eliot was living with a married man, and polite society disapproved of the arrangement, despite Eliot’s partner being in an open relationship. 

Mary Ann Evans was forced to admit that it was she who was truly George Eliot after other writers began claiming they were George Eliot. Fortunately, Eliot’s books had already become beloved by the public and Mary Ann carried on living with her partner without harm to her book sales. 

Eliot’s most notable novels include Adam Bede, The Mill on Floss, and Middlemarch. Middlemarch in particular stands out among her works - it is the novel most often adapted to TV and film and although scholarly opinions remain mixed, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf were personal fans of the novel. Emily Dickinson once said in a letter to her cousin: “What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”

Count that Day Lost

George Eliot

If you sit down at set of sun 

And count the acts that you have done, 

And, counting, find 

One self-denying deed, one word 

That eased the heart of him who heard, 

One glance most kind 

That fell like sunshine where it went -- 

Then you may count that day well spent. 

But if, through all the livelong day, 

You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay -- 

If, through it all 

You've nothing done that you can trace 

That brought the sunshine to one face-- 

No act most small 

That helped some soul and nothing cost -- 

Then count that day as worse than lost.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend. 

Today is the birthday of Catharina Questiers, Dutch writer. 

Catharina was born in 1631 in Amsterdam where she lived her whole life. She focused her efforts on plays and poetry and is speculated to be the youngest person to write Dutch plays and have them professionally produced. 

Catharina Questiers gained public noteriety when her play, based on the structure of the popular Spanish romances, premiered starring the alluring Ariana Nozeman, a top-billed actress. Sold out performances and positive reviews solidified Questiers as a playwright to watch. 

Questiers amassed a substantial amount of wealth in her lifetime. She didn’t marry until age 34 which was strange for the time. She claimed to have put off marriage because she enjoyed her freedom so much. Questiers also knew that once she were married she would have to give up any paid work, which she did after marrying Johan Cough in 1664. Her last play was The Battle for Laurels. 

And today is the birthday of Voltaire, French philosopher, writer, and historian. 

Voltaire was born Francois-Marie Arouet in 1694 in Paris to an upper-middle-class family. His parents hoped he would grow up to become a lawyer or at least have a steady career in government. But the independent-minded youngin wished to become a writer instead. 

However, young Voltaire did still have to make money and so he worked some jobs set up by his father. He wrote essays, histories, and poetry, developing a quick wit which made him a popular among the socialites in Paris. 

Naturally, his independent spirit and penchant for satire got him in trouble along the way. He went to jail or was exiled to England a few times in response to unflattering depictions of the Regent and the Church - though the French Regent would later honor Voltaire for his writings. 

Voltaire adopted the name “Voltaire” in 1718 after one of his spells in jail. His last name “Arouet” unfortunately was very similar to the French word for getting beaten up - an easy target for puns and highly unglamorous. As a child, Voltaire’s sister had often called him “un petit volontaire” or “a determined little thing.” Voltaire is also an anagram for the Latin-ized form of the French name “Arouet” - the anagram theory is supported by scholars. In any case, it certainly made him stand out even more among his contemporaries. 

Voltaire’s exile to England proved rather productive as he mixed with the best the literary community had to offer. Returning to France, he was able to finally sort out his shabby financial situation and receive money his father had tied up in a trust for him. With that, Voltaire could devote himself entirely to writing, without having to worry about money - must’ve been nice. 

Voltaire lived to the ripe old age of 83 - quite a feat in the 18th century. He is one of the most beloved French writers, countless writers, scholars, and politicians of his time and after cite Voltaire’s works as instrumental in forming their own philosophies. 

Famous quotations attributed to Voltaire include:

• “Best is the enemy of good.”
• “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
• “The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.” And
• “Common sense is not so common.”

birth-day

Lucille Clifton

If you like this poem, check out the collected works of Lucille Clifton, a modern American poet.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today’s episode is brought to you by the generous, the warm-hearted, the green-thumbed Candy P. or Oregon.

Today is the birthday of Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish writer. 

Lagerlöf was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving the award in 1909 at the age of 51 “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings.”

Lagerlöf was quiet and contemplative as a child, busying herself with books in between private tutoring sessions with her siblings and listening enraptured by her grandmother's telling of fairy and folk tales.  She finished reading her first novel at age seven and by age ten had read the Bible cover to cover. 

She received an education to become a teacher and for a few years in the 1880s, she gladly regaled her students with stories during all possible lessons. She worked on her first novel in her spare time. 

Her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, slowly became a hit and it’s eventually status as a bestseller allowed her to quit teaching to write full time. 

Her next works were largely inspired by her travels to Israel, the East, and Italy. She was commissioned to write a children’s book with an emphasis on teaching geography. The final product was The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, the Swedish title I will not be attempting to pronounce. It became so popular as to be translated into 30 languages. The tale revolves around main character Nils who gets shrunk down to three or four inches and then flies around on the backs of geese trying to make his way home so he can be returned to his proper size. 

In addition to publishing prolifically over a 50-year career, Lagerlöf was deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement in Sweden. In addition to being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, she was also the first woman to be a member of the Swedish Academy and the first woman to be featured on Swedish currency. 

During WWII, Lagerlöf donated her gold Nobel Prize to neighboring Finland who was in the midst of fending off encroaching Soviet Forces. Reportedly, the Finnish government was so moved Lagerlöf’s donation, that they returned the prize after raising the equivalent monies themselves. 

The Copernican System

Thomas Chatterton

The Sun revolving on his axis turns,

And with creative fire intensely burns;

Impell'd by forcive air, our Earth supreme,

Rolls with the planets round the solar gleam.

First Mercury completes his transient year,

Glowing, refulgent, with reflected glare;

Bright Venus occupies a wider way,

The early harbinger of night and day;

More distant still our globe terraqueous turns,

Nor chills intense, nor fiercely heated burns;

Around her rolls the lunar orb of light,

Trailing her silver glories through the night:

On the Earth's orbit see the various signs,

Mark where the Sun our year completing shines;

First the bright Ram his languid ray improves;

Next glaring watry thro' the Bull he moves;

The am'rous Twins admit his genial ray;

Now burning thro' the Crab he takes his way;

The Lion flaming bears the solar power;

The Virgin faints beneath the sultry show'r,

Now the just Balance weighs his equal force,

The slimy Serpent swelters in his course;

The sabled Archer clouds his languid face;

The Goat, with tempests, urges on his race;

Now in the Wat'rer his faint beams appear,

And the cold Fishes end the circling year.

Beyond our globe the sanguine Mars displays

A strong reflection of primoeval rays;

Next belted Jupiter far distant gleams,

Scarcely enlighten'd with the solar beams,

With four unfix'd receptacles of light,

He tours majestic thro' the spacious height:

But farther yet the tardy Saturn lags,

And five attendant Luminaries drags,

Investing with a double ring his pace,

He circles thro' immensity of space.

These are thy wondrous works, first source of Good!

Now more admir'd in being understood.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Hiram Bingham III, American professor and explorer. 

Born in Hawaii to arguably successful missionaries, Hiram Bingham III would hold on to his father’s work ethic and adventurous spirit, though he would not be quite so pious or humble.

In fact, It was Hiram Bingham III who felt that, “If a man were going to work that hard, someone ought to know about it.”

Hiram left Hawaii for the mainland as a teen, bound for the East Coast where he completed his education among Ivy-league colleges. He studied Latin American history and married Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany & Co fortune in 1900 at age 24. The Tiffany side of Alfreda’s family looked down on Bingham who they felt had yet to prove himself worthy . 

Bingham then spent his next few years as a professor, first at Harvard, then at Princeton under Woodrow Wilson, and finally landing back at his alma mater Yale in 1907. 

Bingham had his first taste of exploration after attending a conference in 1908 in Santiago, Chile. Crossing through Peru on his way back, he was convinced by a local to check out the nearby Incan ruins of Choquequirao. Bingham published an account of his travels when he returned back to the states, which threw him unofficially into the ring of the last age of discovery. 

Wanting to prove himself to the world and his wife’s family, and inspired by tales of the Lost Incan City, Bingham had the audacious idea to go find it. An amateur archaeologist and explorer, Bingham was able to get funding from Yale and pull together a crew for the trek into the Andes to find the “Lost City.” After rediscovering the Incan ruins of Vilcabamba and Vitcos, finally, in July 1911, Hiram Bingham was led by a local villager up to Machu Picchu. Armed with a camera and plenty of carry on space, so to speak, Bingham carefully documented his findings and photographed what he could, with the intent to submit an article on his discover to National Geographic magazine. 

Bingham’s party packed up items from the city covered in vines and plants of all kinds. It unclear just how many artifacts Bingham took, and the return of the artifacts to the Peruvian government has been a cause for consternation between Peru and Yale for decades now. 

Bingham published an account of his journey to Machu Picchu in 1948 titled Lost City of the Incas and it was an instant bestseller. 

If you are thinking that Hiram Bingham’s story sounds familiar, you’ll likely be able to recognize many of his characteristics in movie character Indiana Jones - though Bingham had a much more wiry build compared to the muscle-y Jones depicted by Harrison Ford.

Upon the Heights

Yone Noguchi

And victor of life and silence,

I stood upon the Heights; triumphant,

With upturned eyes, I stood,

And smiled unto the sun, and sang

A beautifully sad farewell unto the dying day.

And my thoughts and the eve gathered

Their serpentine mysteries around me,

My thoughts like alien breezes,

The eve like a fragrant legend.

My feeling was that I stood as one

Serenely poised for flight, as a muse

Of golden melody and lofty grace.

Yea, I stood as one scorning the swords

And wanton menace of the cities.

The sun had heavily sunk into the seas beyond,

And left me a tempting sweet and twilight.

The eve with trailing shadows westward

Swept on, and the lengthened shadows of trees

Disappeared: how silently the songs of silence

Steal into my soul! And still I stood

Among the crickets, in the beauteous profundity

Sung by stars; and I saw me

Softly melted into the eve. The moon

Slowly rose: my shadow on the ground

Dreamily began a dreamy roam,

And I upward smiled silent welcome.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1955, the Vietnam War began. It would last 19 years and be a massive stain in the history of American international affairs. It is also known in some parts of Vietnam as the War of American Aggression or simply the American War. History books may call it the Second Indochina War. 

The fight over Vietnam started earlier with the First Indochina War, also known as the Anti-French Resistance War. At the end of WWII, Vietnam was split into two with North Vietnam under the influence of China and South Vietnam under the influence of France. 

There was a desire for all of Vietnam to unite, however, with two nations of opposing forms of government vying for influence, war broke out. 

Fighting between French forces, supported by the USA, and Guerilla and Northern Vietnam forces, supported by China lasted for seven years. The Geneva Peace Conference of 1954 temporarily halted the conflict, again dividing Vietnam into two states, against the wishes of the majority of Vietnamese. 

The US was then even more heavy-handed in their behind the scenes meddling in Vietnamese affairs, using the “domino theory” to justify their early actions. The Domino Theory asserts that if one nation becomes communist, surrounding nations are more likely to also adopt communism. To mitigate the risk of Vietnam uniting as a communist country, American foreign policy leaders quietly assisted Ngô Đình Diệm in becoming President of South Vietnam. However, Diệm quickly took advantage of his power, in essence creating a dictatorship. The American CIA  then supported the generals in South Vietnam who lead the coup against Diệm.

The Vietnam War remains a difficult one to tease out. To many Americans, it seemed meddling in the affairs of another nation was in direct conflict with supporting a Democratic process. Young men were drafted in increasing numbers to fight for unclear purposes, except to not lose. The unauthorized release of the classified Pentagon Papers in June 1971 by The New York Times created a storm of outrage and calls to end American involvement in Vietnam reached a fever-pitch. 

The final US troops were withdrawn from Saigon, what is now Ho Chi Minh City, in April 1975. 

Repressions of War Experience

Siegfried Sassoon

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;

What silly beggars they are to blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—

No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war,

When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;

And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad

Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts

That drive them out to jabber among the trees. 

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.

Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,

And you're as right as rain….

                                     Why won't it rain?…

I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night,

With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,

And make the roses hang their dripping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are,

Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,

Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green

And every kind of colour. Which will you read?

Come on; O do read something; they're so wise.

I tell you all the wisdom of the world

Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet

You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,

And listen to the silence: on the ceiling

There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;

And in the breathless air outside the house

The garden waits for something that delays.

There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,—

Not people killed in battle,—they're in France,—

But horrible shapes in shrouds—old men who died

Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls,

Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

* * *

You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;

You'd never think there was a bloody war on!…

O yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns.

Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft … they never cease—

Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out

And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy;

I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend. 

Today is Halloween for most of the globe. Halloween is typically celebrated with costume dressing, trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins, bobbing for apples and general mischief. 

Many people believe that Halloween traditions have sprouted out of a Christian festival, but its true roots are not that simple. 

Halloween is indeed a Christian name: it is a shortened version of “All Hallows’ Eve.” November 1st is celebrated as All Saints Day, or All Hallows’ Day and November 2nd is All Souls Day in the Christian tradition.  

Of course, All Saints Day and All Souls Day didn’t start out on Nov. 1st and 2nd - at first they were celebrated by Christian parishes at all different times, many occurring in April or May. 

When the church finally did decide on November 1st and 2nd, the Gaelic festival Samhain began to blend with the feast days. 

Samhain celebrated the end of the harvest season and kicked off the darker part of the year. It was a day of cleansing and so big bonfires were lit, offerings were made to the dead, and the barrier between worlds was supposedly at its thinnest. 

The spookiness surrounding Halloween likely stems from the clear ties to honoring those that have died but whose souls live on - and may try to come back to Earth. 

The trick-or-treating and costuming is theorized to mainly be a repeating of Christmas traditions, which included almsgiving to the poor, role swapping, and “mumming,” a silent play where actors wear costumes, similar to a nativity pageant. 

The practice of “trick or treating” is said to derive from the practice of working-class people visiting the homes of their employers asking for a handout or donation. If the upperclassmen did not comply, “tricks” were played, usually on the boss’s property. Again, this was originally part of Christmas celebrations, but it seems to have duplicated at Halloween. 

Candles and fires, part of the Gaelic Samhain, became integral parts of the new Halloween tradition. Candles helped offer the dead light to see by while mating their way out of the world. Jack O'Lanterns then served a dual purpose: to scare away evil spirits and offer light for the good ones. 

It’s a bit difficult to say just how much businesses have contributed to Halloween, but it’s safe to say the candy and confectionery industry have done their best to make and keep candy an integral part of Halloween. In 2018, Americans spent $2.6 billion on Halloween candy. 

After Halloween traditions spread to North America in the late 19th century, the holiday began its slow evolution into the spooky day we know now. Today countries all over the world celebrate Halloween - even here in Vietnam there are pumpkins and cobwebs decorating restaurants and homes. 

If you’re looking for the full story on Halloween, check out the book Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers.

A Little Ghost

Dame Mary Gilmore 

The moonlight flutters from the sky

To meet her at the door,

A little ghost, whose steps have passed

Across the creaking floor.

And rustling vines that lightly tap

Against the window-pane,

Throw shadows on the white-washed walls

To blot them out again.

The moonlight leads her as she goes

Across a narrow plain,

By all the old, familiar ways

That know her steps again.

And through the scrub it leads her on

And brings her to the creek,

But by the broken dam she stops

And seems as she would speak.

She moves her lips, but not a sound

Ripples the silent air;

She wrings her little hands, ah, me!

The sadness of despair!

While overhead the black-duck's wing

Cuts like a flash upon

The startled air, that scarcely shrinks

Ere he afar is gone.

And curlews wake, and wailing cry

Cur-lew! cur-lew! cur-lew!

Till all the Bush, with nameless dread

Is pulsing through and through.

The moonlight leads her back again

And leaves her at the door,

A little ghost whose steps have passed

Across the creaking floor.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a Happy Halloween. 

Today is the birthday of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, American writer. 

Elizabeth grew up in Springfield, Kentucky in the late 1800s. She attended the University of Kentucky briefly, dropping out on account of poor health. Roberts was gravely disappointed as she wholeheartedly enjoyed literature and philosophy. She moved back home, taking up a career in teaching. 

In 1910, Elizabeth had had enough of her hometown and moved to Colorado bear her sister. It seems the new environment was beneficial to her and she began writing more seriously, publishing a short book of poetry. After encouragement from a professor friend, Roberts, at age 36, found herself a college student once again, this time at the University of Chicago. She thrived in the academic community and achieving her lifelong dream of a college education seemed to bolster her can-do spirit. She returned back to Springfield, Kentucky and began writing novels. Her first novel The Time of Man (1926) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Roberts went on to write ten more novels, all fairly successful during her lifetime. 

Elizabeth Maddox Roberts passes away at the age of 59 in 1941 from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

And today is the birthday of Georges Gilles de la Tourette, French physician. 

Although today Tourette is remembered for first recognizing maladie de tics, or Tourette’s Syndrome, he did quite a bit more than that. 

Gilles de la Tourette began medical studies at the age of 16. Instead of heading to premier academic institutions in Frances, his mother urged him to go to Poitiers. She was concerned that the “temptations” of Paris would distract and corrupt her son. 

However, he could not be kept from Paris forever. At age 20, Tourette enrolled in additional medical studies in Paris. He became a standout pupil of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, a leading physician and neurologist. Charcot took Tourette on as an assistant when Tourette finished his studies. 

As Charcot’s assistant at Salpêtrière Hospital Tourette came in contact with a wide range of patients, which is where he began to make the connection between patient who all exhibited certain tics that they could not control. He wrote a scientific paper on his finding describing it as “maladies de tics,” but it was Charcot who re-named it after Tourette. 

Influenced by his mentor Charcot, Tourette took a keen interest in the infant field of neurology. He wrote and lectured extensively on hysteria, hypnosis, and later in life, on forensic science. It’s possible that Sigmund Freud attended some of Tourette’s lectures in Paris and was influenced by his work. 

Tourette, for all his smarts, was turned down for advancement in management - it was clear his passion lay in the research and treatment of patients, and not administration. Taking his career as a whole it’s clear Tourette loved the puzzles and mysteries neurology afforded him. Even after a deranged former patient shot at him in his office, Tourette continued to practice, lecture, and write. 

Autumn

Elizabeth Maddox Roberts

Dick and Will and Charles and I 

Were playing it was election day, 

And I was running for president, 

And Dick was a band that was going to play, 

And Charles and Will were a street parade, 

But Clarence came and said that he 

Was going to run for president, 

And I could run for school-trustee. 

He made some flags for Charles and Will 

And a badge to go on Dickie's coat. 

He stood some cornstalks by the fence 

And had them for the men that vote. 

Then he climbed on a box and made a speech 

To the cornstalk men that were in a row. 

It was all about the dem-o-crats, 

And 'I de-fy any man to show.' 

And 'I de-fy any man to say.' 

And all about 'It's a big disgrace.' 

He spoke his speech out very loud 

And shook his fist in a cornstalk's face.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

The date is October 29th, Tuesday, and today I’m coming to you from Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon in Vietnam. 

On this day in 1964, the biggest jewelry heist in history took place at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Notable gems stolen included the 563-carat sapphire Star of India, the 100-carat DeLong Ruby, and the 16-carat Eagle Diamond.

Jack “Murf the Surf” Murphy and Alan Kuhn were the brains of the operation. In Miami they had reputations as party boys, not afraid to spend their profits from steady burglary jobs. They never used force, preferring to burgle and steal while wealthy hotel guests were out of their rooms. A few times hotel staff and insurers were even in on the jobs. 

Partially on a whim, Murf and Kuhn flew up to New York in October of 1964 with only a general plan to do some burgling. They explored New York, as tourists do, and Murphy noticed that some of the museums had surprisingly minimal security. He turned the group’s attention to the Natural History Museum which housed jewels of the J.P. Morgan collection. 

Murphy and Kuhn spent about a week casing the museum by day, and partying rather conspicuously by night. When it came time to do the job, things went incredibly smooth. 

Connecticuter Roger Clark played lookout and getaway driver, while Murphy and Kuhn were hands on. The two scaled the spiked fence around the Natural History Museum, climbed up the stone face of the museum building, and finally opened a fourth floor window, entering right into the gallery that housed the jewels. The pair waited in the quiet darkness to see if guards would come walking by - but not a single guard appeared. Murf and Kuhn were utterly alone in the gallery. They set to work silently cutting open the glass displays. As they lifted the gems out of their cases, they braced for a cacophony of alarms…but no alarms ever went off. 

Clark picked up Murf and Kuhn, and the three drove off into the night. Murf and Kuhn were on a flight back to Miami before the first guard noticed the jewels were missing. 

The burglars victory dances didn’t last long though - they were apprehended within 48 hours - much of their partying and flamboyant spending habits in New York making them stand out as suspicious to hotel staff and restaurateurs. 

The lead detective on the case managed to pick up Roger Clark by staking out the boys’ hotel room. Clark eventually flipped on the two masterminds, and Kuhn and Murf were picked up by police at their apartment in Miami and taken back to New York for processing. 

Despite their crimes, Murf and Kuhn became celebrities of sorts during the prosecution of their heist in New York City. As young tanned Florida men with mischievous smiles, it was easy to be charmed by the thieves. During the investigation it was obvious that the American Museum of Natural History had serious gaps in their security system and also had neglected to insure numerous precious stones. 

Click here to read a full article on the 50th anniversary of the heist.

A Dream Pang

Robert Frost

I had withdrawn in forest, and my song

Was swallowed up in leaves that blew away;

And to the forest edge you came one day

(This was my dream) and looked and pondered long,

But did not enter, though the wish was strong:

You shook your pensive head as who should say,

‘I dare not—too far in his footsteps stray—

He must seek me would he undo the wrong.’

Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all

Behind low boughs the trees let down outside;

And the sweet pang it cost me not to call

And tell you that I saw does still abide.

But ’tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,

For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Edith Head, American costume designer. Prolific from the 1940s through the 1970s, Edith was nominated for 35 Academy Awards, and won 8, a record that has yet to be topped. 

Costume design was actually Edith’s second career. She received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in French from UC Berkeley and Stanford University, respectively. She taught French at the high school level in the 1920s in Los Angeles and offered to teach art as well in the hopes of increasing her salary. When given the position Edith scrambled to enroll in a few evening courses at two local design schools, including Otis College of Art and Design. 

Fully in love with drawing, Edith traded teaching for an entry level job as a costume sketch artist at Paramount Studios in 1924. By the 1930s, Edith Head had worked her way up through the ranks of costume design at Paramount. Her first big success which gained her public notoriety, was her “sarong” dress design for Dorothy Lamour in the 1937 film The Hurricane. 

Edith Head became popular among the Paramount Studio starlets of the 1940s and ‘50s and personally dressed a number of them. She would give special attention to the female stars, consulting with them on projects, making her a favorite as compared to her male counterparts. Paramount would sometimes “loan out” Edith to other studios at the request of various actresses. 

In addition to her work in Hollywood classics such as Carrie (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Funny Face (1957), and TV series Bewitched, Edith Head continues to influence costume culture today. Perhaps the most recognizable tribute to Head is in the Incredibles series’ character Edna Mode. The characters thick rimmed glasses, straight bangs, and penchant for all-black ensembles are taken straight from Edith Head’s own personal “look.”

And today is the birthday of Eileen Shanahan, Irish poet. 

Born in 1901 in Dublin, Eileen never published a collection of poems. To date we only know of about 70 poems that she wrote. However, the 11 that were published during her lifetime have been published widely in periodicals and anthologies. Perhaps busy with raising a family and working for the League of Nations, Shanahan just didn’t have time. 

Her poetry is generally melancholic or dark, centering on themes of war, lost love, and childhood. 

And today is the birthday of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Dutch philosopher. 

Erasmus, who said, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes,” wrote prolifically during the Reformation Age in the 1500s. His allegorical essay In Praise of Folly was a runaway best-seller by today’s standards. Upon a “republication” of the work, German artist Hans Holbein, a favorite portraitist of Henry VIII and court, provided illustrations for the essay. 

He managed to become a favorite philosopher of both the Protestant and Catholic leaders, for his criticisms of abusive Catholic practices and his loyalty to the Pope in Rome.

The Three Children (near Clonmel)

Eileen Shanahan

I met three children on the road—

The hawthorn trees were sweet with rain,

The hills had drawn their white blinds down—

Three children on the road from town.

Their wealthy eyes in splendour mocked

Their faded rags and bare wet feet—

The King had sent his daughters out

To play at peasants in the street.

I could not see the palace walls,

The avenues were dumb with mist;

Perhaps a queen would watch and weep

For lips that she had borne and kissed.

And lost about the lonely world,

With treasury of hair and eye,

The tigers of the world will spring,

The merchants of the world will buy.

And one will sell her eyes for gold,

And one will barter them for bread,

And one will watch their glory fade

Beside the looking-glass, unwed.

A hundred years will softly pass

Yet on the Tipperary hills

The shadows of a king and queen

Will darken on the daffodils.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1960, Abebe Bikila became the first sub-Saharan African to win an Olympic gold medal, and the first Ethiopian gold medalist. 

It was the Summer Olympics in Rome and Abebe Bikila had just bought a new pair of shoes a week earlier for the marathon. The shoes, to his disappointment gave him awful blisters and so Bikila decided he would just run without shoes. 

That’s right, Abebe Bikila won a Gold Medal running barefoot. Luckily for Bikila the race started in the late-afternoon and finished after dark so the course was cooling down while he ran. 

Bikila was neck-and-neck with another competitor until the last 500 meters (nearly a third of a mile) when he took off in a sprint. Italian soldiers holding torches lit the rest of the way as Bikila zoomed past them. 

He finished in 2 hours, 15 minutes, 16.2 seconds, breaking the world record by eight tenths. As soon as he crossed the finish line, he began a calisthenics routine, touching his toes, jogging in place, and reported feeling quite well, later stating he felt he could have run another 10 to 15 km further. 

And today is the birthday of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle, American writer. 

Doolittle was born in 1886, the only girl in a family of 6 children. Education was important in the family: Doolittle’s father was an astronomy professor and her brothers were expected to get a proper education. 

At 15, Doolittle met 16-year-old Ezra Pound, a student at nearby University of Pennsylvania. They began a teenage romance that continued into their early twenties. Pound composed at least 25 poems inspired by Doolittle. 

When it came time for continued education Doolittle attended Bryn Mawr College, a short distance from her home and UPenn. Pound encouraged Doolittle in her writing and dubbed her “H.D.” the pen name which she would use all her life. The two were engaged, but Doolittle’s father rejected the match and their relationship cooled. 

In 1911, she boarded a ship to Europe for a vacation with her female lover Frances Gregg. However, upon arriving in London, Doolittle, a beauty with a sharp, creative mind, was eagerly welcomed by the intellectual community. She stayed in London, working at a literary magazine. In 1913 around age 26, H.D. married poet Richard Adlington. 

Her poetry took advantage of classic Greek mythology and modern psychoanalysis. H.D. was openly bisexual after her marriage failed in 1938 and worked with Sigmund Freud for a while as she explored her own sexuality. 

In addition to her multitude of poems, H.D. Also penned several novels, some of which were published posthumously. Of her poetry collections, her first Sea Gardens published in 1916 remains an important work in the Imagist movement in which H.D. played a key role. 

H.D. was not making any particularly big waves during her lifetime. It was really the feminist and pride movements of the 1970s that saw a revival of her work, reviewing H.D.’s dissection of gender roles and sexuality. 

Baia 

H.D.

I should have thought

in a dream you would have brought

some lovely, perilous thing,

orchids piled in a great sheath,

as who would say (in a dream),

"I send you this,

who left the blue veins

of your throat unkissed."

Why was it that your hands

(that never took mine),

your hands that I could see

drift over the orchid-heads

so carefully,

your hands, so fragile, sure to lift

so gently, the fragile flower-stuff--

ah, ah, how was it

You never sent (in a dream)

the very form, the very scent,

not heavy, not sensuous,

but perilous--perilous--

of orchids, piled in a great sheath,

and folded underneath on a bright scroll,

some word:

Flower sent to flower;

for white hands, the lesser white,

less lovely of flower-leaf,

or

Lover to lover, no kiss,

no touch, but forever and ever this.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Colonel Harland David Sanders, American businessman, founder of KFC.

Sanders was born in 1890 in southern Indiana, not far from the Indiana-Kentucky state line. His mother was a devout Christian and it was perhaps her warnings about the evils of drink that led Sanders to be vehemently against alcohol consumption his whole life. (Her preaching against cursing, however, did no good.)

Sanders’s father died when he was just five and as the oldest child, he was quickly made a helping hand in the home.  By age seven he was adept in the kitchen.

After bouncing around jobs in his teens and twenties and even his thirties, Sanders finally settled down a little bit around age 40 with his family in Kentucky. He already had experience in sales and business which helped served up success in his new restaurant venture. 

Sanders’s “Colonel” title is not from any military service - rather, it is a title bestowed on him by the state of Kentucky. In the mid-1930s Sanders received his first “Colonel” for good deeds in his Kentucky community. He donated food, helped in a few midwifing incidents, and volunteered to drive some of his fellow townsfolk to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. 

With the success of his local Kentucky restaurant, Kentucky again “Colonel’ed” Sanders and this time Sanders began using the title regularly, particularly as he began to promote his Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe. 

For a snarky, well-written article on the life of Colonel Sanders and KFC, see the link in today’s show notes. 

Today is the birthday of Mary Hunter Austin, American poet. 

She took a special interest in the Native American peoples living in the Mojave Desert. Her poetry generally reflects life in the California expanse and celebrates the wildlife and delicate ecosystem of the area. 

Mary Austin was active in the California Water Wars, particularly in Owens Valley where she lived. As Los Angeles extended its reach into surrounding counties for more water to meet its exploding population, the city preyed upon the watershed in Owens Valley. They effectively bullied their way to the water, disrupting the small communities and driving out farmers and residents who were left with few options but to move. 

When she found herself on the losing side of the California Water Wars….

Mary Austin relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California, joining a community of writers and artists. She produced a fair amount of work there, however it was her home in Santa Fe where she would be the most inspired and productive. Two of her most well known works include a collaboration with Ansel Adams and her collection The Land of Little Rain.

The Gods of the Saxon 

Mary Hunter Austin 

We have set the White Christ forward, we have bid the old gods go, 

We be Christians, Christian peoples, singing psalm tunes staid and slow. 

We have strewn the graven idols, we are bounden to the Lord, 

In hoc signo it is written -- but we prove it with the sword. 

For the old gods played us hazards, and they tracked us in their wrath 

By the smoke of sacrifices that we made along our path; 

Saved us to outwit each other; broke us if they listed, then, 

And at best of all their saving they were gods, and we were men. 

But the White Christ he is lowly, he hath thorns about his brow, 

He hath sorrowed, he hath suffered, -- Lord, what boots thy sorrow now? 

Seeing that we give our brother to the kite-kind and the crow, 

And the shell-strewn bones to whiten where the shy wild cattle go. 

And the old gods gather, gather where the shrilling bugles break, 

For the hot blown breath of battle fans the elder gods awake, 

Calling high above the trumpets, saying, 'Thus the old rune runs, 

By the net that took the fathers ye shall surely snare the sons. 

'By the bitter lust of empire, by the fret of boasts withstood, 

By the itch of prideful peoples that must make their boastings good, 

In the fern damp, by the veldt-side, we have brought them stark and low, 

They that wake no more for mornings, nor for any winds that blow.' 

We be Christians, Christian peoples, thinking scorn of ruder days, 

But above the Pax Vobiscum, keener than the prayers we raise, 

Come the jeering gods of warfare from the ends of all the earth, 

By the White Christ, wan and wounded, and they mock him with their mirth.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, French military leader and political influencer. Lafayette, as he is known in the States, was instrumental in the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution both in the second half of the 1700s. 

The first part of Lafayette’s life was of true comfort. He was born to wealthy aristocratic parents in 1757. His upbringing and education were balanced and with a long line of military men before him, Lafayette developed a healthy taste for action. (His father died in battle when Lafayette was a month away from 2 years old.)

At 16 he was betrothed to 14-year-old Adrienne de Noailles and they married soon thereafter. 

Around age 18 Lafayette became a believer in the American Revolution. He came to see the cause as a noble one - the colonies were fighting for justice against a greedy Britain. As a French aristocrat, Lafayette likely already had a deeply entrenched sense of contempt for the British nation. 

Going against a royal decree, Lafayette traveled to America to join the fight against the British. His military training would prove invaluable for the Americans and he was present at a number of important Revolutionary battles including the final Battle of Yorktown. 

And today is the birthday of Zelia Nuttall, American anthropologist and archaeologist. 

Despite what may seem like a nerdy description, Nuttall was a force. She was born to an Irish father and Mexican-American mother in San Francisco in 1857. 

After a lengthy education in Europe, Nuttall discovered a fascination with MesoAmerica in a visit to Mexico in 1884. Her clear passion and excitement for the history of native peoples in Mexico shone through in a paper about a grouping of Mexican artifacts. The publication impressed the archaeology community so much that Nuttall was given a position at Harvard University as the Special Assistant of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Nuttall would come to love Mexico and its history so much that she moved there permanently. She continued archaeological and anthropological work even though she was rarely paid for it. She did find a benefactor in Phoebe Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst, who funded a number of her projects. 

Nuttall work on Mexico’s ancient history served to give a newfound pride to the nation and helped to dispel popular but negative narratives of MesoAmericans. 

To Fayette

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As when far off the warbled strains are heard

That soar on Morning's wing the vales among,

Within his cage th' imprison'd matin bird

Swells the full chorus with a generous song:

He bathes no pinion in the dewy light,

No Father's joy, no Lover's bliss he shares,

Yet still the rising radiance cheers his sight—

His Fellows' freedom soothes the Captive's cares!

Thou, FAYETTE! who didst wake with startling voice

Life's better sun from that long wintry night,

Thus in thy Country's triumphs shalt rejoice

And mock with raptures high in the dungeon's might:

For lo! the morning struggles into day,

And Slavery's spectres shriek and vanish from the ray!

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend.

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Today is the birthday of Robert Fergusson, Scottish poet. 

He enrolled at the University of St Andrews in Scotland in 1765 at the age of about 15. While there, Fergusson narrowly escaped expulsion, made important connections and honed his writing skills. When his father passed away in 1768  he moved back home to help support his mother. 

He got involved in the bohemian scene in Edinburgh and began contributing poems to a small weekly periodical. He wrote poems both in English and “Scots.” 

Scottish bard Robert Burns cites Fergusson as a major influence on his own work, inspiring him to write in both English and “Scots” as well. Burns even paid for a new headstone for Fergusson’s burial plot. 

Fergusson achieved his legacy in a very short time - he died in 1775 at the age of 24. He was involuntarily sent to a mental hospital after a fall left him with a concussion. He lasted just a few weeks at the asylum. (Perhaps his sudden and suspicious death helped bring attention to his work?)

And today is the birthday of Amy Beach, American composer and pianist. 

Although Amy was something of a child prodigy, her parents tried not to indulge her too much in her desire to perform, believing that seceding to her demands would spoil her. They did allow her to receive proper training as she matured, and her career as an exacting pianist began when she was just 16 with a performance at the Boston Music Hall. 

In 1885 at age 18, Amy married 42-year-old Dr. H.H.A. Beach. It was his second marriage. Dr. Beach was apparently encouraging toward Mary in her music, but ultimately the union stunted the growth of her performance career. At the time, it was frowned upon for married women to perform musically unless for charity’s sake. Amy Beach then turned her attention toward composing. 

Beach’s composing ability was largely self-taught. Dr. Beach disapproved of her having a private tutor, and so Mrs. Beach read as many books as she could on the subject. Her first score came in 1892 with a public performance of her Mass in E-flat Major. It was a hit with critics who compared Beach to Bach. 

Beach’s Gaelic Symphony was her next piece. It was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. The Boston Symphony gave a performance of the piece in 1896. The symphony gained her a reputation as an unofficial “one of the boys” of the unofficial Second New England School and the sixth member of the Boston Six. Four years later, Beach performed as the pianist in her own Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony. 

The success of her compositions saw Amy performing more. Beach performed her own compositions in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago to delighted audiences. 

With the death of Dr. Beach in 1910 and her mother several months later, Amy sank into a depression. She headed for Europe hoping to distract herself. 

While in Europe, she recovered from her melancholia and began to play and compose again. She was a favorite in Germany and wrote numerous compositions there. However, she wouldn’t have access to them until 1929 when her suitcase which had been confiscated at her departure in 1914 (the start of WWI), was finally released to her. 

Returning to America, Beach published more of her compositions and received a decent income off the sales of her work. Later in life she then turned toward mentorship, hoping to help other female musicians, composers, and conductors make their way through the changing music scene.

Amy Beach passed away in 1944 at the age of 77. 

A Burlesque Elegy

Robert Fergusson

On the Amputation of a Student’s hair, before his Orders.

O sad catastrophe! event most dire!

   How shall the loss, the heavy loss, be borne? 

Or how the muse attune the plaintive lyre, 

   To sing of Strephon with his ringlets shorn? 

Say, ye who can divine the mighty cause 

   From whence this modern circumcision springs, 

Why such oppressive and such rigid laws 

   Are still attendant on religious things?

Alas, poor Strephon ! to the stern decree 

   Which prunes your tresses, are you doom'd to yield? 

Soon shall your caput, like the blasted tree, 

   Diffuse its faded honours o'er the field. 

Now let the solemn sounds of mourning swell, 

   And wake sad echoes to prolong the lay; 

For, hark! methinks I hear the tragic knell; 

   This hour bespeaks the barber on his way. 

O razor! yet thy poignant edge suspend; 

   O yet indulge me with a short delay; 

Till I once more pourtray my youthful friend, 

   Ere his proud locks are scatter'd on the clay. 

Ere the huge wig, in formal curls array'd 

   With pulvile pregnant, shall o'ershade his face; 

Or, like the wide umbrella, lend its aid 

   To banish lustre from the sacred place. 

Mourn, O ye zephyrs! for, alas! no more 

   His waving ringlets shall your call obey!

For, ah! the stubborn wig must now be wore,

   Since Strephon's locks are scatter'd on the clay. 

Amanda, too, in bitter anguish sighs, 

   And grieves the metamorphosis to see. 

Mourn not, Amanda, for the hair that lies

   Dead on the ground shall be revived for thee. 

Some skilful artist of a French frizeur, 

   With graceful rinklets shall thy temples bind, 

And cull the precious relics from the floor, 

   Which yet may flutter in the wanton wind. 

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1781, 44 Spanish settlers officially founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles, known today as Los Angeles, California. 

Compared to other settlements, los Ángeles was specifically a municipal settlement: not a Catholic mission base or strategic military settlement. It was the second pueblo in the Spanish colonization of Alta California, just after San Jose. 

The settlers were recruited from other settlements in the area with a promise of large plots of land. Per the ordinances set out by the Spanish government on how to create new towns, the main town center roads were constructed from SW to NE and NW to SE – so in an x rather than a plus-sign. To this day Downtown Los Angeles streets maintain 45-degree angles. 

Los Angeles remained a Spanish settlement for about 40 years until it became a part of Mexico with Mexican independence in 1821. Los Angeles and Alta California changed hands again in 1847 when Mexico was defeated by America in the Mexican-American war. 

Now part of America, Los Angeles saw its rise as a Southwestern mecca with the completion of the Southern Pacific rail line in 1876 and the discovery of oil in 1892. 20 years later, Hollywood’s booming movie industry proved to be a substantial draw for those seeking work. In 1932 the city hosted the Summer Olympics, and with the advent of WWII Los Angeles became a major manufacturing hub and military and shipping port.  

With a mild, sunny, Mediterranean-like climate and what seemed like endless job opportunities in a variety of fields, Los Angeles saw its population more than double from the end of WWII to 1990. 

From a small criss-crossed settlement, Los Angeles has become the second largest metropolis in the United States and is perhaps the definition of urban sprawl. In Los Angeles, there is a bit of everything for everyone.

And today is the birthday of Mary Renault, English-South African writer.

Born Eileen Mary Challans in 1905 in England, Mary graduated from college in 1928 with a degree in English. However, at the onset of WWII, Mary found herself signing up to train as a nurse. She determined she would write in her spare time. 

While in training, Mary met fellow nurse Julie Mullard. It was soon clear that there was an attraction between the two. Mary and Julie began a romantic relationship that would last their whole lives. 

Renault’s first novel Purposes of Love (1939) is based on her time working as a nurse. But it is her novel The Friendly Young Ladies (1943) published four years later and also based on her experience as a nurse, that is more autobiographical. The main will-they-won’t-they couple is lesbian compared to the straight couple in her first novel. 

Although Renault’s historical fictions were her most widely read work, it was her novel Return to Night that won a prize from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. The award amount was $150,000 or about $1.6 million in today’s dollars. With the winnings, Mary and Julie moved to an open-minded expat community in South Africa.

Renault has been hailed in the LGBTQ community for inclusions of gay and lesbian couples in her work. In particular, her Greek historical fiction novels depicted homosexual relationships between men. A product of her own time, Renault herself was unsure about the pride movements of the ‘70s. She did not think of herself as a “gay writer” and preferred not to be defined by her sexual orientation.

Your World

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Your world is as big as you make it. 

I know, for I used to abide

In the narrowest nest in a corner, 

My wings pressing close to my side. 

But I sighted the distant horizon 

Where the skyline encircled the sea 

And I throbbed with a burning desire 

To travel this immensity. 

I battered the cordons around me 

And cradled my wings on the breeze, 

Then soared to the uttermost reaches 

With rapture, with power, with ease!

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Lev Semenovich Pontryagin, Soviet mathematician. 

In 1922 or ‘23 at age 14, an explosion of a small cooking stove left Lev Pontryagin blind. His parents were not well-off by any means, but his mother, Tat'yana Andreevna, insisted Lev continue his studies. She dedicated herself to helping Pontryagin adjust to his new situation as blind. In particular, she would read to him from his textbooks and write down his answers to equations on homework. She grew to know the course materials so well she would sometimes correct his work, which naturally had mistakes, as he honed his abstract thinking skills. 

Eventually, Pontryagin left home for college. Pontryagin did not take notes in his classes since of course he could not see. However, his professors soon noticed he had an outstanding mind. Pontryagin was able to memorize formulas and perform equations in his head, impressing professors and students alike. He graduated from the University of Moscow in 1929 at the age of 20 and immediately was offered a position at the University. 

As a professor and researcher, Pontryagin made significant contributions to mathematics, specifically in algebraic and differential topology. He enjoyed a long career at Steklov Institute in Russia and was a member of the Academy of Sciences (in France) as well as the International Mathematical Union.

And today is the birthday of Sarah Orne Jewett, American writer. 

Jewett was known during her lifetime primarily for her short stories. She was born in 1849 in South Berwick, ME, a small town in southern Maine, a short distance from Portsmouth. 

As a child she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Her father, the town’s doctor, prescribed walks outdoors as treatment, and so Jewett developed a deep love of nature and her small town. 

The Country of the Pointed Firs remains Jewett’s most significant work. It is a novella primarily exaulted for its description of local country life rather than its quiet plot.  Similar to her other short stories and writings, The Country of the Pointed Firs was first published in serialized form in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896, when Jewett was 46. 

Jewett, like fellow New England writer Katherine Lee Bates, engaged in what was known as a “Boston marriage.” She never married, but lived with close friend and widow Annie Fields from 1881 until Jewett’s death in 1909. 

Despite being known as a writer of American literary regionalism (writing and celebrating small towns, rather than big-city life), Jewett was well traveled. She enjoyed an extended trip to Europe with her companion Annie Fields, and the pair frequented nearby Boston, where they hosted gatherings of popular and indie American and European writers. 

At Home from Church

Sarah Orne Jewett

The lilacs lift in generous bloom 

   Their plumes of dear old-fashioned flowers; 

Their fragrance fills the still old house 

   Where left alone I count the hours. 

High in the apple-trees the bees 

   Are humming, busy in the sun,— 

An idle robin cries for rain 

   But once or twice and then is done. 

The Sunday-morning quiet holds 

   In heavy slumber all the street, 

While from the church, just out of sight 

   Behind the elms, comes slow and sweet 

The organ’s drone, the voices faint 

   That sing the quaint long-meter hymn— 

I somehow feel as if shut out 

   From some mysterious temple, dim 

And beautiful with blue and red 

   And golden lights from windows high, 

Where angels in the shadows stand 

   And earth seems very near the sky. 

The day-dream fades—and so I try 

   Again to catch the tune that brings 

No thought of temple nor of priest, 

   But only of a voice that sings.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

In honor of Labor Day on Monday, today we’re taking a look at how we got Labor Day. 

No one is sure who exactly the first person to propose the idea was, but anyone who has worked has probably, at one point, had the idea that everyone that works should have a day off. 

The first recorded group to hold a specifically Labor Day picnic in honor of all their workers was the Central Labor Union in New York City. They chose Tuesday September 5th in 1882 and 1883. 

As the idea and practice spread among Labor Unions, the holiday was celebrated in increasing numbers in towns and cities. By 1887 Oregon was the first state to pass the holiday into law, with the majority of states having adopted the day on their own by 1894.  Later that same year Congress passed Labor Day into law, declaring it a national holiday. 

And today is the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, English writer. 

Mary was born in 1797 “20 minutes after 11 at night” (according to her father’s journal). Ten days later, her mother, feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died of a bacterial infection, leaving Mary to be raised by her father political philosopher William Godwin. 

Godwin was devoted to his daughter’s education. He gave her full access to his extensive library and often took her, her siblings and step-siblings out on “field trips.” He encouraged Mary to read her late mother’s work, particularly, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (This and her father’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice would be doctrines she tried to live by.)

Mary maintained a solid relationship with her father and there was a definite adoration between the two. However, when 16-year-old Mary began a relationship with the already married 22-year-old Percy Shelley, her father did not approve.  When Mary and Percy ran off together and eloped (Percy was still married), Mary’s father essentially disowned her. 

Mary and Shelley lived together for the next two years and encouraged each other’s writing. Though Shelley was often unfaithful to Mary, she stuck with him, claiming to believe in the concept of “free love,” though she did not practice it herself until later in life. The two married in December 1816 after the suicide of Shelley’s first wife. Mary was 19. 

Mary Shelley’s most iconic and influential novel Frankenstein, (or A Modern Prometheus,) was famously first drafted during a rainy summer spent at Lake Geneva in the company of Lord Byron. Mary and Percy did not stay at Lord Byron’s rented villa, but their close proximity and tendency toward political chatter saw them quickly develop friendship. It was during one of the rainy stretches that Lord Byron suggested the party each come up with a ghost story. Mary at first was self-conscious that she wouldn’t be able to come up with anything. (At 18 she was the youngest of the group, and her anxiety over the “challenge” is completely understandable, especially being surrounded by two already established writers, and having to compete with her step-sister for Percy’s wandering eye.) But after a day of musing and brainstorming, she came up with Frankenstein. What she originally thought would be a short story developed over the next few years into a full-length novel. 

Frankenstein was first published anonymously, and was well-received, with critics speculating Percy Shelley as the author. It appeared to dip in popularity with critics when Mary Shelley was revealed as the true author. However, Frankenstein has since become part of the English canon and is sometimes credited as the first English science-fiction book. 

Mary and her father’s relationship was mended with her marriage to Percy. Godwin lauded praises on his daughter’s work – his opinion was perhaps the one she valued most after Percy. Godwin once wrote to his beloved daughter: 

"[Frankenstein] is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of….you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind in a manner...most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. If you cannot be independent, who should be?"  

Stanzas ("Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!")

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Oh, come to me in dreams, my love! 

I will not ask a dearer bliss; 

Come with the starry beams, my love, 

And press mine eyelids with thy kiss. 

’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell, 

Love visited a Grecian maid, 

Till she disturbed the sacred spell, 

And woke to find her hopes betrayed. 

But gentle sleep shall veil my sight, 

And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be, 

When, in the visions of the night, 

Thou dost renew thy vows to me. 

Then come to me in dreams, my love, 

I will not ask a dearer bliss; 

Come with the starry beams, my love, 

And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely holiday weekend.

Today is the birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, American physician and writer.

Born in 1809, he had the good fortunate to attend small but good schools in Boston. From a young age, Holmes was noted as a very talkative lad. It was the only sticking point for his secondary school teachers, who admired his quick mind. 

At sixteen Holmes enrolled at Harvard University. He carried on his love for reading and chatting by joining the “Puffmaniacs” a group of students who would sit around talking about all manner of things while smoking, presumably, pipes. 

Struggling in his law studies some years later, Holmes occupied himself with writing poetry. He discovered he rather had a knack for it. By 1830 he had become a well-known and in-demand poet in a young America. 

However, Holmes ultimately settled on a career in medicine and wrote in his free time. He was often called upon to compose poems for special occasions and so felt he was a “florist of verse.” He knew invitations came with the expectation that he would read a relevant poem of his own creation. 

Along with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, James Lowell, and William Bryant, Holmes is known as a Fireside Poet. His poems generally used conventional rhymes, a strong sense of rhythm, and wholesome “family-friendly” subjects. 

And today is the birthday of Vivien Thomas, African American medical researcher and assistant surgeon.

The grandson of a slave, Vivien Thomas had dreams of becoming a doctor. However, the Great Depression in 1929 thwarted his plans of a medical degree. He stopped taking classes at what is now known as Tennessee State University and instead found work as a lab assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. Although he was classified as and paid like a janitor, by the mid-1930s, Thomas was doing the work of a postdoc under the tutelage of Blalock. 

When Blalock accepted a position at John Hopkins, he insisted that Thomas be hired along with him. At John Hopkins, Blalock and Thomas were approached by Helen Taussig to develop a procedure that would save newborns with blue baby syndrome. Blalock directed Thomas to begin experimenting with procedures on dogs. 

After Thomas completed a number of successful surgeries on dogs, Blalock was confident that a similar procedure would work on affected babies. Of course, this is an oversimplification of what was a harrowing effort, but suffice it to say that Blalock, Thomas, and Taussig succeeded in understanding the problems of blue baby syndrome and finding the first surgical procedure to cure the condition.

A colleague of Blalock's at John Hopkins, Dr. J. Alex Haller, remembered, "Dr. Blalock once said that Vivien Thomas' hands were more important to him in the development of the blue-baby operation than his own -- and he meant it."

The Last Leaf

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I saw him once before,

As he passed by the door,

And again

The pavement stones resound,

As he totters o’er the ground

With his cane.

They say that in his prime,

Ere the pruning-knife of Time

Cut him down,

Not a better man was found

By the Crier on his round

Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,

And looks at all he meets

Sad and wan,

And he shakes his feeble head,

That it seems as if he said,

“They are gone.”

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said—

Poor old lady, she is dead

Long ago—

That he had a Roman nose,

And his cheek was like a rose

In the snow;

But now his nose is thin,

And it rests upon his chin

Like a staff,

And a crook is in his back,

And a melancholy crack

In his laugh.

I know it is a sin

For me to sit and grin

At him here;

But the old three-cornered hat,

And the breeches, and all that,

Are so queer!

And if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

In the spring,

Let them smile, as I do now,

At the old forsaken bough

Where I cling.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1963 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” Speech as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

MLK addressed a crowd of approximately 250,000 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The whole March is generally regarded as the impetus for the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

As a Reverend, MLK’s speech contained plenty of language from the Christian Bible. It also contains allusions to Shakespeare, as well as the popular hymn “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” the American Declaration of Independence, and President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. 

As MLK walked off the stage to a moved crowd, he gave the typed copy of his speech to the volunteer security guard George Raveling, who still has it. 

In the days following the speech, television, radio stations, and newspapers (including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post) alike praised King’s eloquence and delivery. The speech made such an impact on the “American consciousness” as to compel the FBI to add MLK to a list of persons who were threats to national security.

In lieu of a poem, today we’re featuring an abridged version from the “I Have a Dream” Speech. I’ll do my best to do it justice. 

Excerpt from “I Have a Dream” Speech. 

Five score years ago, a great American…signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free…One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity…

In a sense we've come to our nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men…would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note… Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation…

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy… Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream… 

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal." … 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exhalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and…all flesh shall see it together.

…With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony…

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true…

…when we allow freedom ring…from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children…will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1927 in Canada, five women filed a petition to the Supreme Court of Canada. Their petition asked, "Does the word 'Persons' in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?"

The five women were Emily Murphy, Irene Marryat Parlby, Nellie Mooney McClung, Louise Crummy McKinney and Henrietta Muir Edwards. They are sometimes known as “The Famous Five” or “ The Valiant Five.” 

The petition was part of a larger movement toward expanded equal rights for women in Canada. Though women had the right to vote in Canada, they were still barred from serving in politics, specifically, the Senate. Over six months later, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not “persons.” 

They kept on keeping on though, and finally in October 1929, the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned that decision, setting the precedent that women are indeed persons. What a concept!

And today is the birthday of Kenji Miyazawa, Japanese writer. 

Miyazawa was born in 1896 in Hanamaki, Iwate, a rice-growing region in the northern half of Japan. Miyazawa was the oldest son of a wealthy pawn-broker, and Miyazawa quickly developed a distaste for what he saw in his father as an obsession with wealth and social status. 

But it was his father’s wealth and social status that afforded him educational opportunities. As a child and tween, Miyazawa attended lectures organized by his father for the Buddhist monks in the town. He went on to be a bright student at Morioka Agriculture and Forestry College. Miyazawa was quite attuned to the hard times suffered by rice farmers and his education focused on modern methods of farming. 

He moved back home to Hanamaki to help care for his sick younger sister. He took up a teaching position at the local agricultural school. When his sister succumbed to her illness and passed away, Miyazawa was devastated. He remained in his hometown and his teaching position for a few more years, during which he would self-publish a collection of poems and write children’s stories. 

Miyazawa’s writings were not critical or financial successes during his lifetime, but they survived as part of the Japanese pastoral. In the 1960s, a number of his poems were translated into English by American poet Gary Synder, resulting in increased interest in Miyazawa in both Japan and America. 

Be Not Defeated by Rain

Kenji Miyazawa

(translated by David Sulz)

Be not defeated by the rain, Nor let the wind prove your better.

Succumb not to the snows of winter. Nor be bested by the heat of summer.

Be strong in body. Unfettered by desire. Not enticed to anger. Cultivate a quiet joy.

Count yourself last in everything. Put others before you.

Watch well and listen closely. Hold the learned lessons dear.

A thatch-roof house, in a meadow, nestled in a pine grove's shade.

A handful of rice, some miso, and a few vegetables to suffice for the day.

If, to the East, a child lies sick: Go forth and nurse him to health.

If, to the West, an old lady stands exhausted: Go forth, and relieve her of burden.

If, to the South, a man lies dying: Go forth with words of courage to dispel his fear.

If, to the North, an argument or fight ensues: 

Go forth and beg them stop such a waste of effort and of spirit.

In times of drought, shed tears of sympathy. 

In summers cold, walk in concern and empathy.

Stand aloof of the unknowing masses:

Better dismissed as useless than flattered as a "Great Man."

This is my goal, the person I strive to become

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Zona Gale, American writer.

Zona Gale upon returning to her small hometown in Wisconsin at the age of 28, she found it rife with material.  She moved home and devoted herself full-time to writing. 

Gale attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI receiving a Bachelor’s and Master's in literature. Before settling back into her hometown she wrote for newspapers in New York City and Wisconsin. 

As she worked on her novels, Zona Gale published poetry and short stories, using connections from her newspaper days to find periodicals to submit her work. She published her first novel in 1906 and found national success with her 1920 novel Miss Lulu Betts.

Miss Lulu Betts told the story of a young single female who is able to pull herself up by the bootstraps despite the limited opportunities afforded by her small Midwestern town. 

Gale adapted Miss Lulu Betts for the stage where it enjoyed further acclaim. Gale received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921 for it, making her the first female to be awarded the prize for drama. 

Zona Gale was an active proponent for women’s rights in her home state of Wisconsin. An unmarried woman, in a small Midwestern town, it's likely Gale was met with a certain amount of contempt by neighbors. She enjoyed frequent travels to New York City and California both for business and pleasure. 

In total, Zona Gale wrote 12 novels, numerous short stories, and 7 plays in addition to a collection of poetry. 

Today is the birthday of Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, French inventor. 

Born in 1740, Joseph-Michel was the 12th born of the 16 Montgolfier children. He was apparently a dreamer from a young age. With an older brother lined up to overtake the Montgolfier family business, perhaps Joseph-Michel didn’t feel the need to pick up financial or management skills. And when his older brother unexpectedly passed away, it was Joseph-Michel’s younger brother, Jacques-Étienne, who was selected to lead the family business when the time came. 

Joseph-Michel Montgolfier had an early interest in aeronautics. As a young teen he built himself parachutes, once jumping from the top of the family home to test one.

One day, Montgolfier was contemplating some laundry drying on a line over a fire. He noticed that several items were billowed open and would float up. Intrigued by the phenomenon, he constructed a small wooden rectangle and fastened fabric about the top of it. He lit a crumpled-up piece of paper underneath the thing and was delighted to see the fabric billow open and the whole thing lift off the ground. 

With his brother Jacques-Étienne, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier was able to develop hot air balloons, launching the flying craze in Europe. After successfully sending up a few animals in one of their balloons, in 1783 a Montgolfier hot air balloon was the first manned flight recorded in Europe. 
 

The Dining Room

Zona Gale

I laid the blue dishes on the table.

The dining room was still and sunny.

Zinnias were in a brown basket,

The grape-fruit plant was glossy in a window.

Skillful fingers had wrought the border of the curtain.

My grand-mother's blue pitcher was on the side-board.

There were chestnut leaves in the brown rag.

Barometer and thermometer recorded miracle on the rose wall.

Dark wood paneled and beamed us in together.

As I worked with these exquisite patient familiar things let me within.

They let me look with their eyes, feel with their beating pulses of hurrying molecules.

I perceived how locomotion and consciousness and self-consciousness have advanced us.

By what means shall we go forward now?

Does anyone wonder at my slow patience as I wonder at the slow patience of these exquisite and familiar things?

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening!

On this day in 1944, King Michael of Romania ousted the military dictatorship and declared war on Germany, switching sides from Axis to Allies. 

At the onset of the war, Romania monarch Carol II, Michael’s father, was forced to abdicate after a military coup. Ion Antonescu (eyon Antonescuu)became dictator and had Michael crowned as king, though he only served as a figurehead. Antonescu allied with Nazi Germany in WWII. 

By 1944 the Romania was in turmoil. King Michael was able to successfully bring together Ally sympathizers to overthrow Antonescu. King Michael then declared war on Germany, effectively switching sides in the war. 

One historian has estimated that this event shortened the war by about six months, preventing countless more lives from being lost. (Romania unfortunately did not fair well in the treaty they signed with the USSR.)

And on this day in 1973, the Salad Bowl Strike began in California. It was the largest strike of farm workers in US history. 

The United Farmworkers of America (UFW) had tried repeatedly to negotiate with farmers for better working conditions for labors. When the negotiations had clearly failed, union leader César Chávez led the Salad Bowl Strike in which 5000-7000 laborers walked off grape and lettuce farms in protest against poor working conditions. 

The price of iceberg lettuce skyrocketed as a result and crops began to rot in the fields. 

Although the Salad Bowl Strike did not see immediate success, it became an important lesson for the United Farmworkers. During the Salad Bowl Strike, UFW’s reputation suffered as their picketing and boycotting led to violence in some areas. Union leader Chávez came to the conclusion that to make real progress he’d have to push for legal reform. 

In 1975, the UFW decided on a small march as a show of protest, rather than organize large numbers of picketers and boycott-ers which could lead to unintended riots and/or violence. Leaders of the UFW marched from San Francisco to Modesto in California, about 100 miles. By the time the small group reached Modesto, they weren’t small anymore. Nearly 15,000 people had joined the march along the way and the new governor of California was quick to push for labor law reform. 

And finally, in more recent history, on this day in 1991, the World Wide Web was open to the public. 

The Web began as a closed system for sharing documents and research at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, an employee at CERN, who had grown increasingly frustrated with not being able to access the latest information needed in his line of work. He wrote multiple proposals for the creation of a “web” where information could be shared and accessed with linked sources, or “hyperlinks.”

The World Wide Web is a cornerstone of the Information Age. It has become vital to the spread of information and education as well as the increased globalization of the planet.

The Eagle of the Blue

Herman Melville

Aloft he guards the starry folds 

Who is the brother of the star; 

The bird whose joy is in the wind 

Exulteth in the war. 

No painted plume—a sober hue, 

His beauty is his power; 

That eager calm of gaze intent 

Foresees the Sibyl’s hour. 

Austere, he crowns the swaying perch, 

Flapped by the angry flag; 

The hurricane from the battery sings, 

But his claw has known the crag. 

Amid the scream of shells, his scream 

Runs shrilling; and the glare 

Of eyes that brave the blinding sun 

The volleyed flame can bear. 

The pride of quenchless strength is his— 

Strength which, though chained, avails; 

The very rebel looks and thrills— 

The anchored Emblem hails. 

Though scarred in many a furious fray, 

No deadly hurt he knew; 

Well may we think his years are charmed— 

The Eagle of the Blue.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend. 

Today is the birthday of Ray Bradbury, American author. Bradbury is best remembered for his novel Fahrenheit 451. 

When Ray was 14, the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles from their small town in Illinois. Ray’s father had been out of work and was searching in booming Southern California. 

When his father came home one day and announced he’d found a steady full-time job, Ray was ecstatic. The young Bradbury had already fallen in love with Hollywood. 

Bradbury was an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy and a regular at book stores and libraries. In high school he was active in the poetry club and drama club, as many are wont to do in Los Angeles. 

Graduating high school during the Great Depression, Bradbury admits that the family simply didn’t have money to send him to college. In lieu of university, Bradbury claims to have gone to the library 3 times a week for 10 years post-graduation. 

When he was disqualified from serving in the US forces due to poor eyesight, Bradbury doubled down on devoting himself full-time to writing. 

Bradbury’s first novel, The Martian Chronicles, was written out of necessity. He and his wife Maggie were expecting their first child. Bradbury was consistently publishing short stories, but with a baby on the way, the couple was going to need a larger income. 

Bradbury took a bus from Los Angeles to New York City in order to find a publisher for his short stories. After being turned down by more than ten publishers, he found hope in a meeting with an editor at Doubleday. The editor told Bradbury that short stories weren’t going to get him very far - he needed a novel to show around. Bradbury did not have a novel. The editor then suggested that Bradbury put together a bunch of his short stories in a collection about life on Mars. 

That night, in his room at a YMCA in NYC, Bradbury typed up an outline for what would become The Martian Chronicles. He stayed up all night and showed the outline to the Doubleday editor the next day. The Doubleday editor gave Bradbury $750 as an advance.

Over the course of Bradbury’s 70 year career, he wrote over 600 short stories and published 27 novels and collections of his work. Fahrenheit 451 remains Bradbury’s best-selling book, with an estimated 10 million copies in circulation. More on Fahrenheit 451 in October on the anniversary of its first publication date. 

Today is the birthday of Claude Debussy, French composer. Debussy most popular tune is “Clair de Lune,” third movement of Suite bergamasque, which he composed in 1890 at the age of 32.

Despite having undeniable talent on the piano Debussy received mixed reviews from his instructors at the Conservatoire de Paris. Some labeled him an excellent student, attentive to direction, where others found him lazy and defiant. He was eventually disqualified from the piano department on account of failing his piano performances. However, he was able to remain at the Conservatoire and enrolled in harmony and composition courses. 

A mentor helped Debussy find summer work as a private piano player for a wealthy household. Debussy quickly found that he wouldn’t mind living in such splendor. Another summer he was placed at the home of Nadezhda (nu-desj-dah) von Meck the patron of Tchaikovsky. 

Debussy spent his 20s and 30s finding his own musical voice. His compositions showed promise and he was well regarded by fellow composers and musicians. However, his more “bohemian” style had yet to be widely accepted. At age 40 in 1902, his operatic rendition of the play Pelléas et Mélisande (Pellia(s) e Mill-e-sand(r)a) gained him acceptance into the international music scene. 

For more on Debussy, see today’s show notes or visit our website wellbredandwellbrewed.com.

Debussy was a certified romantic. He fell hard and fast for talented female conversationalists, whether they were married or not. A few of his personal affairs in his 20s and 30s were possibly the reason he didn’t make it big sooner. They were chiefly a distraction to Debussy who appears to be prone to obsession. 

His final affair with a married Emma Bardac would result in her divorcing her first husband and marrying Debussy. The couple was forced to flee Paris for London for a time while the drama cooled. They had a daughter together, Debussy’s only child. 

In London, Debussy’s work, including compositions from his 20s and 30s, began to gain recognition and his reputation flourished. Sadly, he also was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. A surgery in 1915 stopped the pain temporarily, but Debussy would succumb to the cancer three years later in 1918. He was 55. 

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

Walt Whitman

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, 

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, 

Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, 

And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, 

But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, 

And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, 

And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, 

It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, 

(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) 

Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; 

For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, 

Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, 

I know very well I could not.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Count Basie, African American bandleader, musician, and composer.

Count Basie, born William James Basie in 1904, was tutored by his mother on piano as a child. When his talent surpassed his mother, much like Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s story, his mother scraped money together to send him to private lessons. 

Never a big fan of school, Basie often picked up odd jobs at the local theater in exchange for free admission to shows. It was there where he was exposed to improv. Silent movies were accompanied by live music, often just a pianist.  Sometimes there was music written specifically for a film, but often, it was left up to the player or band to create a soundtrack on the spot. 

As a youngin’ Basie enjoyed playing the drums more than piano. But, Sonny Greer, a fellow musician in the area, outshone Basie as a drummer, and Basie returned to piano, where he could compete for work more successfully. 

After an incubation period in the jazz scene of Harlem in the 1920s, Basie moved to Kansas City. There he formed “Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm,” a precursor to the Count Basie Orchestra. A passion for beat, Count Basie and his Barons were known for their percussion and were asked to do recordings while touring through Chicago. 

Over his 60-year career, Count Basie successfully navigated musical trends: from jazz to jumping to swing. He drew crowds consistently, performing and leading into his 70s, until his death of pancreatic cancer at age 79.

Count Basie is in the Blues Hall of Fame, the New Jersey Hall of Fame, received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in 1974, and is widely considered Jazz Royalty. 

And today is the birthday of Menashe Kadishman, Israeli artist. 

Kadishman, born in British controlled Palestine in 1932, is remembered for his sculptures and colorful paintings of sheep. 

His obsession with sheep began when he was stationed as a soldier in Northern Israel, where he also worked part-time as a sheep herder. 

Before that Kadishman had already studied sculpture (and art more broadly) at the Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv as a teen. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, he traveled to London to attend St Martin’s School of Art and Slade School. 

Kadishman enjoyed a long career, becoming a notable personality in the Tel Aviv cultural community. His sculptures were notable for their apparent gravity-defying construction. Kadishman would use clear glass to support metal structures to achieve the effect. His art has been featured in cities around the world, including Tokyo, New York City, Venice, Toronto, London, Berlin, San Jose in Costa Rica, and of course Tel Aviv. 

Annabel Lee

Edgar Allen Poe

It was many and many a year ago, 

In a kingdom by the sea, 

That a maiden there lived whom you may know 

By the name of ANNABEL LEE; 

And this maiden she lived with no other thought 

Than to love and be loved by me. 

I was a child and she was a child, 

In this kingdom by the sea; 

But we loved with a love that was more than love-

I and my Annabel Lee; 

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven 

Coveted her and me. 

And this was the reason that, long ago, 

In this kingdom by the sea, 

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling 

My beautiful Annabel Lee; 

So that her highborn kinsman came 

And bore her away from me, 

To shut her up in a sepulchre 

In this kingdom by the sea. 

The angels, not half so happy in heaven, 

Went envying her and me- 

Yes! - that was the reason (as all men know, 

In this kingdom by the sea) 

That the wind came out of the cloud by night, 

Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee. 

But our love it was stronger by far than the love 

Of those who were older than we- 

Of many far wiser than we- 

And neither the angels in heaven above, 

Nor the demons down under the sea, 

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul 

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. 

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams 

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 

And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes 

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 

Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, 

In the sepulchre there by the sea, 

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1897, Sir Ronald Ross discovered that female mosquitoes transmit malaria to humans. As such today is also known as World Mosquito Day. 

Sir Ronald Ross had studied all stages of development of the malaria parasite. He therefore was able to recognize the parasite in the gut bacteria of mosquitoes and in their saliva glands. There were already theories that malaria was caused by swamp-like conditions - conditions that are also conducive to high populations of mosquitoes. Ross and colleagues concluded that malaria was spread among humans by infected mosquitoes. 

World Mosquito Day is commemorated by spreading awareness of how fend off mosquitoes. In addition to using screens, bed nets, and hat nets, using fans are a good deterrent as mosquitoes can’t fly well in even the slightest breeze. The average mosquito weighs about 2.5 milligrams - compare that to a single Cheerio, which weighs about 83 milligrams or an 8.5”x11” piece of paper which weighs 4500 milligrams.

And on this day in 1991 Estonia declared its independence from Soviet control. 

It had been a long battle for freedom, but miraculously there was no bloodshed in the process. The Estonian people were able to rally together around a desire for democracy and protection of their homeland. 

Four years prior, in 1987, the Soviet Union was about to undertake a massive mining project in Estonia to harvest Phosphorus. Word got out that the project would have detrimental effects on the environment and surrounding communities, launching the start of the Phosphorite War, a public environmental campaign. 

A few years later Estonian citizens participated in the Baltic Chain, a peaceful demonstration of protest against Soviet rule and a show of solidarity with Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic Chain was nearly 420 miles long and about two million people strong. Participants joined hands across the three Baltic nations, connecting three capitals. 

The Soviet government finally acknowledged Estonia’s independence about a month later. Estonia was welcomed into the United Nations and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004. Estonia’s location on the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland means citizens and tourists can enjoy sweeping coastline vistas, deep fjords, and over 150 nature reserves.

The Duel

Eugene Field

The gingham dog and the calico cat

Side by side on the table sat;

'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)

Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!

      The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate

      Appeared to know as sure as fate

There was going to be a terrible spat.

            (I wasn't there; I simply state

            What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"

And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"

The air was littered, an hour or so,

With bits of gingham and calico,

      While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place

      Up with its hands before its face,

For it always dreaded a family row!

            (Now mind: I'm only telling you

            What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,

And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"

But the gingham dog and the calico cat

Wallowed this way and tumbled that,

      Employing every tooth and claw

      In the awfullest way you ever saw—

And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!

            (Don't fancy I exaggerate—

            I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat

They found no trace of dog or cat;

And some folks think unto this day

That burglars stole that pair away!

      But the truth about the cat and pup

      Is this: they ate each other up!

Now what do you really think of that!

            (The old Dutch clock it told me so,

            And that is how I came to know.)

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Ogden Nash, American humorist and poet. 

Born in 1902, Ogden Nash reports having always enjoyed rhyming. He was known for unconventional rhymes such as rhymes that relied on the mispronunciation of words or rhymes that used two words. 

Nash moved to New York City a few years after dropping out of Harvard and worked writing car ads for a time.  While in New York City, Nash felt gutsy enough to submit some of his rhymes to The New Yorker. The editor of The New Yorker was so pleased with Nash’s rhyming submissions he wrote to him and asked for more. Nash then worked for The New Yorker for a short while before publishing his first collection of poems. 

Ogden Nash went on to have a career as a guest on radio and comedy shows and also toured the nation giving lectures and speeches at colleges. He wrote light verse all his career, publishing a number of collections and continuing to appear in the leading periodicals of the day like Life magazine. 

Despite many silly and clever verses, Nash did happen to get serious for a brief interview in the Prescott Evening Courier in 1958. He said, “This is our world and we are locked in it. And we have to learn to survive together, whether we love or admire each other or not. We must adjust to each other.” 

At heart, Nash may have hoped that even if we don’t all agree with each other, at least, perhaps, we could all share a laugh. Ogden Nash passed away in 1971 at the age of 68.  

Today is the birthday of Coco Chanel, French designer. 

Chanel was born into the opposite of wealth in 1883. Her father was a peddler which meant the young family was constantly on the move from town to town. Their lodgings were generally subpar. It’s doubtful Chanel attended school as a child.

When Chanel was 11, her mother died of tuberculosis and her father sent her and her sisters to live at a convent. Perhaps embarrassed that her father essentially abandoned her, Chanel would later claim that she was raised by two spinster aunts. The convent was Chanel’s first chance to receive a formal education and where she learned to sew. 

After trying and failing to become a singer at clubs, Chanel survived and indeed thrived at being the mistress to several wealthy men. While entangled in one affair she began designing hats - the start of her career as a designer. 

From hats she would move on to open her own boutique in a fashionable and moneyed Street, selling clothing, accessories, and perfume. 

A chance encounter in 1920, saw Chanel and Igor Stravinsky as friends. Stravinsky and his family had fled Russia during the revolution and Chanel graciously offered them rooms at one of her residences until they could find a place of their own. Chanel would go on to make a generous donation that led to a performance of one of Stravinsky's ballets at a popular opera house in Paris. She also became passionate about design costumes for the Ballets Russes and maintained a working relationship with ballet choreographer Sergei Diaghilev for nearly 15 years. 

We don't enough time to cover Coco's whole life - so here are a few recent-ish biographies on the fashion designer and icon: 

• Chanel: An Intimate Life – Lisa Chaney 
• Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life – Justine Picardie 
• The Secret of Chanel No. 5 – Tilar J. Mazzeo 

More About People

Ogden Nash

When people aren't asking questions 

They're making suggestions 

And when they're not doing one of those 

They're either looking over your shoulder or stepping on your toes 

And then as if that weren't enough to annoy you 

They employ you. 

Anybody at leisure 

Incurs everybody's displeasure. 

It seems to be very irking 

To people at work to see other people not working, 

So they tell you that work is wonderful medicine, 

Just look at Firestone and Ford and Edison, 

And they lecture you till they're out of breath or something 

And then if you don't succumb they starve you to death or something. 

All of which results in a nasty quirk: 

That if you don't want to work 

you have to work to earn enough money 

so that you won't have to work.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Wallace Thurman, African American editor and writer. 

Wallace Thurman was a member of the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the late 1920s. He edited several small newspapers and had relationships with writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn Bennett. 

He believed that the struggle of African Americans - the good and the bad - should be acknowledged and explored. As two scholars put it, Thurman felt that “the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.” (Get the book here: The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader)

Thurman was darker skinned than many of his peers and was keenly aware of how he was treated differently because of it. He was thus interested in intra-racial prejudice, or colorism. His thoughts and feeling on the subject are best captured in his 1929 novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life. 

Today is the birthday of Dame Mary Gilmore, Australian journalist and poet. 

After working as a teacher early on in her career, Mary Gilmore left the profession around 1890 at the age of 25. Teaching in primarily rural and mining communities in Australia left her with socialist sympathies and a notebook of early poems. 

She would move to Sydney and join a group of socialist writers writing for change. They were called the “Bulletin school” after The Bulletin, a popular Australian periodical publish much of the writers’ work. 

At the age of 30, Mary moved to Paraguay to join a couple hundred social idealists in “New Australia” a communal settlement started a few years earlier. While there she married William Gilmore and gave birth to a son.

In 1900 the community was struggling and disbanded without much ado. Having lived in a communal settlement, Mary Gilmore and her husband moved to Buenos Aires for several months to work and save for passage back to Australia. They made it back in 1902 and set up on a farm. 

Gilmore continued to write for newspapers and periodicals upon her return and published her first collection of poetry in 1910. She remained concerned with workers’ reform, child welfare, and justice for the indigenous people of Australia. 

In 1937 Mary Gilmore was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire for her literary contributions. At her death, she was awarded a full state funeral, uncommon for writers. Her likeness is featured on the back of the current Australia ten-note. 

Her most famous poem was written during WWII. It is titled “No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest” and is our poem today. 

No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest

Dame Mary Gilmore

Sons of the mountains of Scotland,

Welshmen of coomb and defile,

Breed of the moors of England,

Children of Erin's green isle,

We stand four square to the tempest,

Whatever the battering hail-

No foe shall gather our harvest,

Or sit on our stockyard rail.

Our women shall walk in honour,

Our children shall know no chain,

This land, that is ours forever,

The invader shall strike at in vain.

Anzac!...Tobruk!...and Kokoda!...

Could ever the old blood fail?

No foe shall gather our harvest,

Or sit on our stockyard rail.

So hail-fellow-met we muster,

And hail-fellow-met fall in,

Wherever the guns may thunder,

Or the rocketing air-mail spin!

Born of the soil and the whirlwind,

Though death itself be the gale-

No foe shall gather our harvest

Or sit on our stockyard rail.

We are the sons of Australia,

of the men who fashioned the land;

We are the sons of the women

Who walked with them hand in hand;

And we swear by the dead who bore us,

By the heroes who blazed the trail,

No foe shall gather our harvest,

Or sit on our stockyard rail.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend. 

Today is the birthday of Samuel Coleridge Taylor, African-English composer. 

His Creole father, Dr. Daniel Taylor was visiting London to complete a course of study. While there his father became involved with a London woman named Alice Hare. When Dr. Taylor’s program had ended he returned to Sierra Leone, leaving behind Alice. Dr. Taylor never knew that Alice had become pregnant and it’s possible even Alice didn't know until he was gone.  Alice did not attempt to contact Dr. Taylor to tell him the news and gave birth to a boy in 1875. Alice named their son Samuel Coleridge Taylor, after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

Samuel Coleridge Taylor appears to have grown up in a large loving family. Alice and newborn Sam moved in with Alice’s father and his family.  Little Sam was surrounded by doting aunts and grandparents, many of whom were musically inclined. His grandfather was a decent violinist and taught Samuel how to play. 

Coleridge Taylor quickly surpasses his grandfather in music ability and his grandfather, quite proudly, paid for Taylor to have private violin lessons. 

When he turned 15, the extended family rallied around Coleridge Taylor and helped him get into the Royal College of Music. Perhaps the charge was led by his grandfather? 

Coleridge Taylor then had a successful career as a professional violinist and conductor for a few years and began to compose his own music, which is where he thrived. 

By 1896, aged 21, Coleridge Taylor had the beginnings of a respectable reputation as a composer. During his career, he gained enough notoriety to be received by President Theodore Roosevelt while on tour in America in 1904. He also met with W.E.B DuBois and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar while in the States and was a representative at the First Pan-African Conference in 1900. 

Samuel Coleridge Taylor greatest work was his collection The Song of Hiawatha, based on the work of the same name by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (You can get a taste of it here.)

Coleridge Taylor passed away unexpectedly at the age of 37 in 1912 of pneumonia. His wife, an accomplished musician in her own right, and his two children Hiawatha and Gwendolyn Avril survived him. Both of his children would go on to have successful careers in music.

Coleridge Taylor was not compensated very well despite the popularity of his music. Upon his death his family learned they were not going to receive any royalties for his work. When word got out, King George V bestowed an annual £100 pension to Mrs. Coleridge Taylor. 

Taking heed of the unfairness shown to Coleridge Taylor, composers and musicians banded together to form the Performing Rights Society to vie for protection of their intellectual property.  

Excerpt from The Song of Hiawatha - “Introduction”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

…Ye who love a nation's legends,

Love the ballads of a people,

That like voices from afar off

Call to us to pause and listen,

Speak in tones so plain and childlike,

Scarcely can the ear distinguish

Whether they are sung or spoken;--

Listen to this Indian Legend,

To this Song of Hiawatha!

  Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,

Who have faith in God and Nature,

Who believe that in all ages

Every human heart is human,

That in even [foreign] bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, strivings

…

Listen to this simple story,

To this Song of Hiawatha!

  Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles

Through the green lanes of the country,

…

Pause by some neglected graveyard,

For a while to muse, and ponder

On a half-effaced inscription,

Written with little skill of song-craft,

Homely phrases, but each letter

Full of hope and yet of heart-break,

Full of all the tender pathos

Of the Here and the Hereafter;--

Stay and read this rude inscription,

Read this Song of Hiawatha!

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Stephen Poplawski, Polish-American inventor of the blender. 

Poplawski was born in Poland in 1885 and immigrated to the United States with his family at nine years old. Little is available on his early years, but by 1918 at the age of 33 he had gained enough skills and knowledge to start his own tool company. 

The following year Poplawski was asked to design a mixing machine for soda fountains, popular sugar-centric diners. His hometown of Racine, WI was famous for being the home of Horlick Malted Milk, aka a milkshake, and they needed a mixer that could combine more thoroughly the ingredients of milk and ice cream. 

In 1922 Poplawski patented his mixing machine. It featured a mounted spinning blade that would be encased by a cup. The first design was for commercial use in soda fountains. Poplawski tinkered further with the “mixer” so that it could liquify fruits and vegetables. In 1940 Poplawski patented a new version of the blender, specifically for household use. Poplawski sold his own business to the John Oster Manufacturing Company who released the “Osterizer” not long after the sale, bringing blenders to the masses. 

[You can read about birthday writer Ernest Thayer at our website wellbredandwellbrewed.com. This is an abbreviated version of the poem.]

Casey at the Bat

Ernest Thayer

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:

The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,

And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,

A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

…

They thought, "If only Casey could but get a whack at that—

We'd put up even money now, with Casey at the bat."

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,

And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;

So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,

For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,

And Blake, the much despisèd, tore the cover off the ball;

And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,

There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;

It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;

It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,

For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

…

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;

Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt;

Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,

Defiance flashed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,

And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.

Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—

"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one!" the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,

Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;

...

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone;

He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;

He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;

But Casey still ignored it and the umpire said, "Strike two!"

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered "Fraud!"

But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.

They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,

And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

…

And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,

And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,

But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Don Ho, Hawaiian-American musician. Don was born in Hawaii and joined the Air Force in 1954 at age 23, just a few years after marrying his high school sweetheart. 

Don and his wife Melva moved to California per Don’s job in the Air Force. While there, he picked up an electronic keyboard to accompany his voice. (He had already done a bit of singing as a young man at his Mom’s bar in Hawaii.) 

Not many years later Don Ho left the Air Force and returned to Hawaii to take care of his ailing mother and her bar, Honey’s. Soon, Don found himself performing as the headliner for the bar. As his popularity as an entertainer spread, Don was asked to headline at another bar, Duke’s. Duke’s was a popular spot for celebrities and executives on vacation and Don would be ‘discovered’ by a music agent there. 

Don Ho signed with Reprise Records and would go on to have a successful career over multiple decades. He was able to capitalize on the wave of tourists from America to the newest state in the union (Hawaii). He became a pop icon and, in addition to his own short-lived variety show, Don Ho made appearances on TV shows such as I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch, Batman, and Charlie's Angels.

Despite a persona as an “easygoing romantic rogue,” Don Ho remained married to his high school sweetheart Melva until her death in 1990. Don Ho passed away in 2007.

(Today is also the birthday of Giovanni Agnelli, Sr., Italian co-founder of Fiat. For more on him visit our official website.)

And today is the birthday of Annie Oakley, American sharpshooter. 

Born on the plains of America in 1860, Annie had a hard life. Annie’s father died when she was just six. A few years later, destitute and desperate, her mother “rented” nine-year-old Annie as a servant to a well-to-do but cruel family. The arrangement lasted a grueling two years. 

When Annie returned home she began to trap and hunt. At first, it was simply a means of survival: her hunting put food on the table. But then, as her talent developed, Annie used it to bring in money. She would sell whatever the family couldn’t eat, first, to local shops, then found a vendor who would sell her catches to hotels and restaurants in the large towns and cities of Ohio. With the income, Annie was able to feed her siblings and even helped her mother pay off the mortgage on their home. 

Annie’s career as an entertainer started when she entered into a shooting contest with two traveling frontiersmen. Frank Butler placed a bet that he could shoot better than any local marksman. A resident Hotelier took him up on that bet and presented five-foot, fifteen-year-old Annie Oakley as his competition. Oakley won, impressing Butler who began to court her. The two married a year later. 

Throughout her successful and well-paid career, Annie and her husband donated to charity. Annie was adamant that women should learn to use guns as a means to protect themselves from preadators, particularly given the lawlessness of the West at the time. 

Annie Oakley was a powerful image for young girls in the first decades of the 1900s. She advocated for women to receive more independence and education and is the undisputed inspiration for the image of the “cowgirl.” She used her story as proof that women were as capable as men when given the same opportunities. 

Amores (II)

e.e. cummings

in the rain-

darkness,        the sunset

being sheathed i sit and

think of you

the holy

city which is your face

your little cheeks the streets

of smiles

your eyes half-

thrush

half-angel and your drowsy

lips where float flowers of kiss

and

there is the sweet shy pirouette

your hair

and then

your dancesong

soul.      rarely-beloved

a single star is

uttered,and i

think

           of you

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Katharine Lee Bates, American educator and poet. 

Bates most notably penned the lyrics for “America the Beautiful.” The words were inspired by a hike to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. Bates happened to be teaching a course at a Colorado school for the summer.

Bates’s first draft of “America the Beautiful” was jotted down in a notebook between teaching classes. It was first published in 1895 in a small weekly journal and gained notoriety in 1904 when a new version appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript, an afternoon newspaper.  

But Bates did more than just write “America the Beautiful.” She was a noted educator at Wellesley College, the author of multiple books, and a journalist. She is credited with making American Literature a legitimate course of study and is perhaps the first woman to write a textbook. Her textbook is credited with elevating the writing of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, who were considered fringe writers at the time. 

An unmarried woman in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bates most certainly endured sexism throughout her career. She made it a point to represent the working classes, particularly women. As a war correspondent during the Spanish American War she attempted to show both sides of the fight in order to combat the rampant demonization of the Spanish people. 

Bates maintained an intimate friendship with her fellow Wellesley professor Katharine Coman. The two lived together in the Bates Home, but the full details of their relationship were lost when Bates burned the majority of their letters to each other. Historians are split on the exact nature of their relationship, but the LGBT has embraced Katharine Lee Bates as an icon. 

In 1970, Bates was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame more than 40 years after her death in 1929. Two elementary schools - one in her hometown Falmouth, MA and one in Colorado Springs, Colorado - are named in Katharine Lee Bates honor. Her manuscripts and letters are preserved by Wellesley College, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and the Falmouth Historical Society. 

And today is the birthday of Gladys Bentley, performer, and artist. 

As Gladys Bentley matured during the early 1910s, her sexual orientation became more obvious, much to the dismay of her conservative Trinidadian parents. Feeling wholly unaccepted by her family and community, at 16, Bentley ran away from home. 

She landed in New York at the time of the Harlem Renaissance and ended up thriving. Bentley quickly entered show business, gaining a reputation as a talented entertainer and creator of material. Her act usually consisted of performing in drag to her own humorous and risqué compositions.

Despite being openly gay, Gladys Bentley was embraced by the Harlem community and fans alike. She was so beloved as a performer, the main speakeasy that hosted her would rename itself “Barbara’s Exclusive Club” - Barbara “Bobbie” Minton being her stage name. 

Unfortunately, as time wore on, Bentley was not able to achieve ever increasing fame. When she took her act to Broadway, it was shut down for being too raunchy. Bentley then moved to Los Angeles, CA to try her act there, but she was never able to be as successful as her time in Harlem. 

As Cultural mores shifted away from the loose, easygoing acceptance of the 1920s to the more conservative, afraid views of the 1940s and ‘50s, Bentley found herself under McCarthy Era scrutiny. 

She retreated from performing, attempted and failed at a heterosexual marriage, and finally found some peace in working a ministership. 

[This is the original 1893 version of poem, with the last stanza updated to the 1904 version.]

America. A Poem for July 4.

Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for halcyon skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the enameled plain!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee,

Till souls wax fair as earth and air

And music-hearted sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee

Till paths be wrought through wilds of thought

By pilgrim foot and knee!

O beautiful for glory-tale

Of liberating strife,

When once or twice, for man's avail,

Men lavished precious life!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee

Till selfish gain no longer stain,

The banner of the free!

O beautiful for patriot dream

That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

Undimmed by human tears.

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, American humanitarian. She is also, of course, the wife of Alexander Hamilton. 

Elizabeth Schuyler, sometimes affectionately referred to as Eliza or Betsey, was thrown into high society from her birth in 1757. Eliza was born into large Dutch family and it is unclear how many siblings she had since not all of them lived to adulthood. Her family’s prominence in early America meant she was surrounded by the foremost thinkers of the new nation. She even had a chance to meet Benjamin Franklin. 

When she was 22, Eliza was sent from the Schuyler residence in Albany, NY to Morristown, NJ to live with a maternal Aunt. 

Rather Fortuitously, George Washington’s army was stationed in Morristown and Eliza, in need of society, became friends with Martha Washington and began a courtship with Alexander Hamilton, one of George Washington’s aides. 

A short several months later, Eliza’s father visited Morristown and Hamilton took the opportunity to ask for Eliza’s hand in marriage. Surprisingly, Philip Schuyler accepted the match, despite Hamilton’s uncertain financial situation. No one was in the room where it happened so we can’t know if Hamilton had to do some serious persuading, or if Philip saw something promising in the young Hamilton. 

The couple would be a force to be reckoned with. Eliza supported Hamilton in his work, particularly his writing.  Drafts of The Federalist Papers and Hamilton’s defense of a plan for a national bank are inked in Eliza’s hand. Eliza would rekindle her friendship with Martha Washington during their husbands’ time at the White House, the first entertainers for guests of the newly independent America. 

On the whole the Hamiltons maintained a solid marriage raising 8 of their own children, despite an embarrassing extramarital affair on the part of Hamilton. 

When Hamilton died in a duel, Eliza and much of the nation was understandably heartbroken. The information we have regarding Alexander Hamilton survives in large part because of Eliza’s work after his death to preserve his legacy. 

Eliza was also instrumental in the development and operation of the Orphan Asylum Society, now known as Graham Windham. She was one of three founding members of the organization in 1806 and served as VP or president for a combined forty-two years. 

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton had a reputation as strong-willed and occasionally impulsive and lived to be 97. 

(Check out Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton for his lauds of Eliza Hamilton or take a look at Tilar Mazzeo’s book Eliza Hamilton for more facts. if you’re looking for something more dramatized, there is a best-selling fictional take on her story My Dear Hamilton.) 

And today is the birthday of Jean Piaget, Swiss psychologist.

Piaget is remembered for his work in child development and developmental psychology. 

Interested in how knowledge is acquired, Piaget found himself working at a school in France after receiving his own education. While grading tests for his superior, he noticed that children of certain ages consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. The pattern was too obvious to be ignored. 

He began to study more seriously how children acquire knowledge and mentally mature, giving us what is known as “Piaget's theory of cognitive development.”

Piaget became a big proponent of education, serving as Director of the International Bureau of Education, a part of UNESCO. He once said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse.”

Prairie Spring

Willa Cather

Evening and the flat land,

Rich and sombre and always silent;

The miles of fresh-plowed soil,

Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;

The growing wheat, the growing weeds,

The toiling horses, the tired men;

The long empty roads,

Sullen fires of sunset, fading,

The eternal, unresponsive sky.

Against all this, Youth,

Flaming like the wild roses,

Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,

Flashing like a star out of the twilight;

Youth with its insupportable sweetness,

Its fierce necessity,

Its sharp desire,

Singing and singing,

Out of the lips of silence,

Out of the earthy dusk.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend!

Today is the birthday of Sara Teasdale, American poet. 

Born in 1884 in St. Louis Missouri, Sara was a sickly child and her mother kept her at home. At age 10 she was finally deemed healthy enough to attend school. 

Despite having entered into a more public existence, during her teens Sara was still fairly solitary. Her mother had built Sara her own suite in the family home and Sara spent most of her time working, sleeping, and eating in her own quarters. Her enrollment in school was a positive. Sara Teasdale gained friends and a mentor which chased away much of the loneliness to which she had grown accustomed. 

Done with school at 18, Teasdale’s mentor, Lillie Rose Ernst, encouraged her to join a women’s group she was forming. In 1904, Teasdale was a member of the Potters. The Potters was a group of young women in St Louis that worked together to publish The Potter’s Wheel, a monthly literary magazine. Teasdale was a member until 1907 when she began to focus on her own career. 

Teasdale saw her first success with her collection titled Helen of Troy and Other Poems in 1911. She began to attract the attention of male admirers of her poetry and fell in love with Vachel Lindsay, a fellow poet. 

However, Lindsay was a struggling artist, and did not propose marriage to Teasdale. She ended the affair heartbroken, and married Ernst Filsinger in 1914. 

She continued to write and publish successfully, despite a marriage strained by her husband’s constant absence for business. Her 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea was a best-seller and a few years later she published Love Songs, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1918. (Here’s a collection of all of her poetry.)

Despite literary success, Teasdale was prone to bouts of depression and loneliness. She and her husband had no children and they would divorce when Sara was in her 40s. She reignited a friendship with Lindsay who was no married with children. It seemed this only compounded her loneliness and she began to suffer from serious depression. 

No ties left to the world, Teasdale overdosed on sleeping pills at age 49. Over three hundred of her poems are in the public domain, with notable poems including: “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “I Shall Not Care.”  

And today is the birthday of Bob Smith, American surgeon and co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bob Smith’s struggle with alcoholism started as soon as he began drinking in college at Dartmouth and continued through medical school and then as a practicing doctor. 

Bob Smith tried and failed to stay sober for years. But it wasn’t until he befriended Bill Wilson, another recovering alcoholic that the two successfully were able to remain sober. 

Bob Smith, with the help of Bill Wilson, had his last drink on June 10th, 1935. The two went on to co-found Alcoholics Anonymous, publishing the organizations first “Big Book” in 1939 which included stories from 100 men who had achieved sobriety. In 1946, a new edition was published that included the 12 Steps.

Union Square

Sara Teasdale

With the man I love who loves me not, 

I walked in the street-lamps' flare; 

We watched the world go home that night 

In a flood through Union Square.

I leaned to catch the words he said 

That were light as a snowflake falling; 

Ah well that he never leaned to hear 

The words my heart was calling.

And on we walked and on we walked 

Past the fiery lights of the picture shows -- 

Where the girls with thirsty eyes go by 

On the errand each man knows.

And on we walked and on we walked, 

At the door at last we said good-bye; 

I knew by his smile he had not heard 

My heart's unuttered cry.

With the man I love who loves me not 

I walked in the street-lamps' flare -- 

But oh, the girls who ask for love 

In the lights of Union Square.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of Mata Hari, Dutch dancer and spy. 

Born in the Netherlands as Margaretha Zelle in 1876, her lavish childhood fell apart when her father declared bankruptcy in 1889. Her parents divorced and her mother died not long afterwards. Margaretha was sent to live with a godfather.

Eighteen and ready for change, Margaretha Zelle answered an ad in a newspaper. A Dutch Army Captain was looking for a wife. As you may be able to predict, the marriage didn’t work out well. Zelle was swept away to Java where her new husband, 20 years her senior, proceeded to reveal alcoholic and abusive tendencies. She found solace in studying Indonesian traditions and by joining a local dance group. 

After a few more turbulent years in Indonesia, the couple returned to Europe where a divorce was finalized. Margaretha then moved to Paris, and rose to fame as an exotic dancer, taking the name Mata Hari. 

Mata Hari’s fame as a dancer made her a favorite entertainer in Europe and led to her recruitment as a spy for the Allies during WWI. Ultimately and unfortunately, Mata Hari got caught in the crosshairs of WWI espionage. Naïve and out of her element, she was not fully prepared to be a spy. As paranoia set in on the side of the French, the Allies convicted her double-crossing and Mata Hari was executed. She remains a controversial casualty of WWI. 

Today is the birthday of Kermit Love, American puppeteer and costume designer. We have Kermit Love to thank for Sesame Street residents Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster. 

Born in 1916 in New Jersey, Kermit Love was raised by his grandparents after the death of his mother at age three. His grandparents first introduced him to puppets when he was a child, and they were big fans of radio programs. In his teens, a horsing accident confined Kermit Love to bed, and to fill his time, he began drawing characters to fit the voices on the radio program. 

Kermit Love was a young man during the Great Depression and found work through the New Deal Works Progress Administration as a mask maker in a theater department. From there he entered into the tight-knit world of the Theater. 

Kermit Love found his next job in a ballet costume department in New York City under the tutelage of ballet costume designer Barbara Karinska. Karinska would turn Love’s sketches for costumes into reality for the stage and with her blessing he traveled to Europe, working as a costume designer in Paris and then London, before heading back to the States in 1962. 

Back in New York City, Love found himself in a perfect partnership with big-time choreographer George Balanchine and former ballerina Twyla Tharp both of whom he worked with for many years. 

A friend of Love’s introduced him to Jim Henson. Jim Henson and his Muppets, including Kermit the Frog, had already taken off, but he needed help on a new project: Sesame Street. 

Henson had some drawings ready for a new gaggle of motion puppets but it was Love who helped bring them to life. Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Mr. Snuffleupagus were all the handy work of Love. Kermit Love in fact accompanied Big Bird on a few tours and made a few appearances as Willy the Hot Dog Vendor on Sesame Street. 

Kermit Love enjoyed a long tenure as a designer, passing away in 2008 at 91.

They shut me up in Prose (445)

Emily Dickinson

They shut me up in Prose –

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet –

Because they liked me “still” –

Still! Could themself have peeped –

And seen my Brain–go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason–in the Pound –

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down upon Captivity –

And laugh– No more have I –

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

On this day in 1825 Bolívia declared independence. The rumblings of independence began as early as 1808 when the Spanish crown was overthrown. The uncertain times in Spain created room for uprisings across all of Latin America, including Bolívia, which was then known as Charcas. 

Charcas had an uphill battle. As one of only two land-locked countries in South America, they had to drive out Spanish loyalists as well as fend off Argentina and Peru who both attempted to expand their influence Bolívia. 

Charcas was fortunate enough to have Simon Bolívar as their first president. Simon Bolívar had led the fight for independence in multiple countries in South America and to secure his leadership was an important step for a new nation. 

However, Simon Bolívar wanted Charcas to unite with Peru. It’s theorized that to persuade Bolívar away from that idea, the Charcas government council took the name “Bolívia” for their new independent nation. 

And today is the birthday of Alfred Lord Tennyson, English poet. 

Recognizable lines we get from Tennyson include:

• “'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”
• "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"
• "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers"

Born in 1809 to a reverend, Tennyson is more proof that you don’t have to have a torturous childhood to become a successful writer. He was one of five in a loving middle-class family. His father was savvy with money for a reverend and the family always had just enough to take a yearly vacation. 

Of course Tennyson did not lead a life completely free of strife. His father passed away when Tennyson was nearly done with college. When Tennyson returned for the funeral services he missed the end of the term and did not obtain an official degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Two years later Tennyson’s best friend and brother-in-law suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. On top of that Tennyson’s second book of poetry was unfavorably reviewed. 

It wasn’t until nearly ten years later that Tennyson would see literary success with his 1842 collection of poems titled, what else, Poems. 

Alfred Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland by Queen Victoria and served from 1850 to his death in 1892. One of his enduring poems “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was written during his time as Laureate. 

Lord Tennyson remains the laureate with the longest tenure. He was also the first person to be raised to a British peerage (the “Lord” titled) for his writing. His is the ninth most-quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. 

Marriage Morning

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Light, so low upon earth, 

   You send a flash to the sun. 

Here is the golden close of love, 

   All my wooing is done. 

O all the woods and the meadows, 

   Woods where we hid from the wet, 

Stiles where we stay'd to be kind, 

   Meadows in which we met! 

Light, so low in the vale 

   You flash and lighten afar:

For this is the golden morning of love, 

   And you are his morning star. 

Flash, I am coming, I come, 

   By meadow and stile and wood:

Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, 

   Into my heart and my blood! 

Heart, are you great enough 

   For a love that never tires? 

O heart, are you great enough for love? 

   I have heard of thorns and briers. 

Over the thorns and briers, 

   Over the meadows and stiles, 

Over the world to the end of it 

   Flash of a million miles.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Guy de Maupassant, French author. Maupassant is considered the father of the modern short story. During his lifetime he published over 200 short stories, seven novels, and a poetry collection. 

Born in 1850 in France, Maupassant was no stranger to family drama. When he was 11, his mother was finally able to separate from an abusive husband. Maupassant, his mother, and his brother moved away to a small town, settling comfortably into a villa. Maupassant’s mother was an avid reader and provided a solid educational foundation from which Maupassant would grow. 

In his 20s Maupassant had the good fortune to have Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, as a mentor. Through Flaubert, Maupassant successfully entered the literary world, becoming a bestselling author and an in-demand contributor to literary magazines and periodicals. 

Maupassant joined a group of intellectuals and artists - one of whom was Alexandre Dumas who protested the Eiffel Tower. In proper melodramatic fashion, Maupassant made it a point to frequent the café below the Eiffel Tower. He noted that sitting under the Tower was the best place to not see it.

Today is the birthday of Gertrude Rush, African American lawyer and activist. 

In Des Moines, IA, Gertrude married James B. Rush in 1907. After marrying, Gertrude Rush attended Des Moines College while simultaneously participating in a LaSalle University of Chicago correspondence program. She received both her bachelor’s degree and law degree in 1914.

Four years later, James died unexpectedly, and Gertrude took over his law practice. She also filled in for her late husband in his activist roles in the Des Moines Community. When she was denied entry to the American Bar Association, she and three other black lawyers started their own, known as the Negro Bar Association, later known as the National Bar Association.

Today is the birthday of Peter Viereck, American poet, political philosopher, and professor. 

Peter was born in 1916 in New York City. Peter’s own father was a poet and journalist, but questionable politics would lead to Viereck, Sr. four year stint in federal prison. Peter’s views were less radical. 

He gained notoriety first for an article he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly titled “But—I’m a Conservative!” At the time Viereck was finishing up a PhD in European History at Harvard. 

This launched Viereck’s 20-ish year long career as a journalist as a political philosopher. He was a conservative in name but exercised a more moderate view, particularly in the second half of his career. [He had a strong moral compass and supported New Deal policies while denouncing the fear-mongering rhetoric of conservative provocateurs such as George McCarthy of the McCarthy era.] By the 1960s, conservative media would reject his contributions as too moderate, while his previous association with conservatives barred him from journaling for liberal media outlets. 

Aside from politics, Viereck is remembered today for his poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1949 for his debut collection Terror and Decorum and published consistently afterwards. Viereck embraced the traditional in his poems and believed the only “proper topics” for poems were love and death. 

Again, Again!

Peter Viereck

Who here’s afraid to gawk at lilacs?

Who won’t stand up and praise the moon? 

Who doubts that skies still ache for skylarks,

And waves are lace upon the dune?

But flowering grave-dust, flowerlike snow dust,

But tinkling dew, but fun of hay,

But soothing buzz and scent of sawdust,

Have all been seen, been said—we say. 

BANALITY, our saint, our silly,

The sun’s your adverb, named “Again”;

You wake us willy-nilly

And westward wait to tuck us in. 

We, nurse, are flouted when we flout you,

Even to shock you is cliche. 

O inescapable dowdy!

O gold uniqueness everyday!

Who’s new enough, most now, most youngest?

Enough to eye you most again?

Who’ll love the rose that love wore longest,

Yet say it fresher than brief rain?

I’ll see. I’ll say. I’ll find the word. 

All earth must lilt then willy-nilly,

And vibrate one rich triple chord 

Of August, wine, and waterlily. 

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Marianne Weber, German sociologist, writer, and women’s rights activist. 

At the age of three Marianne was sent away to be raised by her aunt and grandparents upon the death of her mother. Her father and brothers were deemed psychologically unstable by family and would later be institutionalized.

After a proper upbringing and education, in 1891 Marianne was introduced to a few distant cousins, namely, Max Weber, a budding sociologist and philosopher as well as his mother, Helene. Marianne and Max married in 1893, at ages 23 and 29, respectively. Marianne enjoyed being daughter-in-law to Helene with whom she had already grown close.

While Max taught at University of Heidelberg, Marianne pursued philosophy in her spare time as a new wife. She read up on the subject     and became active in a burgeoning feminist movement in Berlin. Around this time, she persuaded her husband to aid in her campaign to increase enrollment of women at Heidelberg. 

In 1907 Marianne proudly opened her own intellectual salon. Simultaneously, she completed her first book and began to regularly publish sociological essays. Essay topics usually involved female and family life and marriage. Summed up, her thoughts were that the institution of marriage is “a complex and ongoing negotiation over power and intimacy, in which money, women's work, and sexuality are key issues."

She was a champion of women’s rights in Germany all her adult life, taking a break from an active role in politics only twice. The first was on account of her husband's sudden death of pneumonia. She spent a few years compiling his unfinished papers into ten volumes and was rewarded with publication of the volumes and an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1924. 

The second break came with the rise of the Nazi party. She was more or less forced out of her role in the Democratic Party, though she continued hosting her intellectual salon throughout WWII. 

Today is the birthday of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (Bar-tol-dee), French sculptor. 

Bartholdi is best known for designing the Statue of Liberty. He studied art in France in his youth, but it wasn’t until a trip to Egypt and Yemen on 1855 at age 21 that he became interested in colossal sculpture. 

At the completion of the Suez Canal, Bartholdi proposed the idea for a lighthouse: a figure draped in robes holding a torch. It was to be called Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia and sounds an awful lot like a description of the Statue of Liberty. The massive project was not commissioned by the Egyptian government. 

Just two years later, Bartholdi made a trip to America and proposed a similar idea in slightly different terms: a massive statue gifted from French to Americans for the 100th year anniversary of American Independence. Fundraising would be the responsibility of the French and American citizens, which was a much easier pill to swallow for the governments involved. 

The Statue of Liberty stands at 151 feet which is 46 meters or about 14 stories high. During the fundraising and construction of the copper statue, Bartholdi enjoyed commissions from many American cities for smaller monuments. 

And today is the birthday of Bertha Lutz, Brazilian feminist, activist, and zoologist. 

She was born in São Paulo Brazil in 1894, the daughter of Adolf Lutz, a prominent physician and epidemiologist. She followed in her father's footsteps, studying biology and natural sciences at university in France. 

But upon returning to Brazil in 1918, it was soon evident that she had a passion for women’s rights. 

She founded League for Intellectual Emancipation of Women shortly after her return. The first mission was achieving women’s suffrage in Brazil and she was a leader in the movement.

And she didn’t stop there. After women receive the right to vote in 1931, Lutz remained active in politics and women’s rights. She received a law degree in 1933 which she felt would help her successfully campaign for government measures that would expand women’s rights, such as gender equality in workplaces. 

As a new Congresswoman in Brazil, one of her first initiatives was the “Statue of Women” which aimed to review all Brazilian laws in order to ensure none would undermine gender equality. 

Fog

Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of Herman Melville, American author and poet. 

Melville’s life started out smooth sailing. He was born in 1819 to loving, doting parents. And they were wealthy to boot. His mother had a vast inheritance as did his merchant father. As years ticked by and the family grew, the Melvilles moved to a bigger house each year in New York City, and maintained two to four servants. The Melville parents enjoyed spending money. To them, it seemed their inheritances were never-ending.

But of course they did end. Eventually Mr. and Mrs. Melville’s respective families, cut them off for over-reaching. The whole family then had to grapple with near bankruptcy. The entire Melville clan, eight kids and two adults, moved to Albany to cut costs and Herman’s father entered the fur trade. 

Herman entered a new school in Albany but was pulled from it after only a few months. He was a fine student, but it’s likely that even the small fee for school was too much of a financial burden. Herman was disappointed and watched on as his two older brothers finished out the year. 

The next big storm to hit Herman’s life was at age 12. Mr. Melville was returning from a business trip by boat, but with below-freezing temperatures, waterways were frozen over. Instead of waiting for better conditions, Mr. Melville commandeered an open carriage to make the rest of the journey.  Mr. Melville arrived home with what would be a fatal cold. 

His father’s death meant Herman would have to find work. 

After working through his teens, Melville joined a whaling voyage as a crew member at about age 20. He was inspired by stories of sea-faring adventures and wanted to check it out for himself.  

Melville did not anticipate just how wild the ride would be. During his time at sea, he abandoned ship with a friend, participated in a mutiny, and eventually left whaling for the navy. He did not return to the continental US until 1844, burnt out from life on the water. 

No matter how much he abhorred his time spent at sea, his family loved hearing accounts of his life as a whaler. Encouraged, he began writing them down. 

It seems almost fitting that a few pieces of writing inspired Melville to begin a journey and then that his own journey inspired him to write.  Perhaps Melville could have saved himself from five years at sea if he had skipped ahead to just writing. But, certainly his work – both his prose and poetry – would be missing the depth of understanding of life at sea. 

Melville’s notable work includes Typee (his first novel and instant success), Redburn, Moby Dick (of course), Pierre, Clarel (an epic poem), and Billy Budd, in addition to short stories and poems. 

The Ribs and Terror in the Whale

Herman Melville

The ribs and terrors in the whale, 

Arched over me a dismal gloom, 

While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, 

And left me deepening down to doom. 

I saw the opening maw of hell, 

With endless pains and sorrows there; 

Which none but they that feel can tell— 

Oh, I was plunging to despair. 

In black distress, I called my God, 

When I could scarce believe him mine, 

He bowed his ear to my complaints— 

No more the whale did me confine. 

With speed he flew to my relief, 

As on a radiant dolphin borne; 

Awful, yet bright, as lightening shone 

The face of my Deliverer God. 

My song for ever shall record 

That terrible, that joyful hour; 

I give the glory to my God, 

His all the mercy and the power.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening. 

Today is the birthday of Ahmet Ertegun, Turkish-American founder of Atlantic Records.

Ahmet was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1923. His father was a successful lawyer and his mother a skilled musician. She played the piano and a number of stringed instruments and indulged in records. Ahmet and his brother Nesuhi were admittedly spoiled by their unimpeded access to the music from the top musicians and bands of the day. 

Ahmet proclaimed he truly fell in love with music at age 9. While in London with his family, Ahmet’s brother Nesuhi dragged him to a concert to see Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and their respective bands play at the Palladium Theater. Ahmet was in awe of the performers and their sound. 

In 1935, Ahmet’s father became the Turkish Ambassador to the United States and the family moved to Washington, D.C.. Ertegun joked that despite attending an affluent private high school and then Georgetown, he “got [his] real education at Howard.” (Meaning Howard University, the historically black University in Washington, D.C.). Although he didn’t share the exact same ethnic heritage, Ertegun felt a kinship with the African American community. When traveling in Europe his family often met with discrimination due to their Muslim background. 

While in college at Georgetown he worked at a record shop while taking in the music scene. Finally, he moved to New York, not knowing exactly what he would do, but determined to be entrenched in the music scene. 

In 1947, with $10000 borrowed from his family dentist, Ertegun and partner Herb Abramson started Atlantic Records. Atlantic was to be the premiere independent label for jazz, gospel, and R&B. 

It was a rocky start. Ertegun was still honing his skills as a talent scout and producer and missed out on stars that would be big. It took 22 records before their independent label finally found commercial success. 

Ertegun did a bit of everything at Atlantic Records in the beginning. He scouted new talent, wrote songs, produced the music, and sometimes hopped on a track as a back-up singer. 

Atlantic Records would sign the likes of Ray Charles and Coltrane and was one of the first labels to record in stereo sound. 

From humble beginnings in an office in a old crumbling hotel, Ertegun helped to grow Atlantic Records into a premiere independent music label. Atlantic stock was ultimately sold to Warner Bro.s in the 1970s, though Ertegun remained active in the company for another 20 years. And of course, he would frequent jazz clubs and concerts until his dying day. 

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

Sir Walter Raleigh

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every shepherd's tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move

To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold

When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb;

The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields

To wayward winter reckoning yields;

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten--

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,

Thy coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,

Had joys no date nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee and be thy love.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of Emily Brontë, English writer. 

Born in 1818 in Northern England, Emily was joyously welcomed. She was the fifth child out of six for a simple clergyman and his wife. Emily’s sister Anne, two years her junior would become her closest confidante. 

Emily’s early years were plagued with loss: her mother died of cancer when Emily was just three. 

At six, Emily was sent away to school, joining her three elder sisters. Charlotte had written home insisting the school was only bad news. The teachers were abusive and abrasive, the instruction subpar and she begged her father to bring them all home. He refused.

Maria the eldest, became sick while at school and made the journey home. Upon her return to the parsonage, she quickly succumbed to her illness. When the remaining three girls arrived home, presumably for Maria’s funeral, Elizabeth the second oldest also succumbed to a months-long cold she contracted at school. Mr. Brontë did not send Charlotte and Emily back to that horrid school, literally fearing for their lives. 

The Brontë’s maternal aunt was already living at the Brontë parsonage. She was put in charge of the children when their mother died and now would oversee their education at home. Despite their middle-income status and remoteness of their village, the remaining Brontë children had access to various written material. 

Emily was notoriously shy around anyone outside her immediate family. She much preferred the solitude of walks outdoors to crowded balls and dinners. Her walks were closely tied to her love of nature. Emily would often return home with a stray country dog at her heels or an injured bird in her hands.

On first glance, the contents of Emily’s only novel Wuthering Heights stand in stark contrast to the life she led. Wuthering Heights is indeed known for psychological torture, violence, and overt sensuality. It confounded readers in 1847 when it was first released. 

However, Emily had quite a bit of practice in drama growing up. In a small country town, the children were educated by their aunt but also had plenty of time to play. On days were they were stuck inside due to weather, the Brontë children made up storylines for a box of toy soldiers. They created their own fictional worlds for their characters, and more often than not the soldiers were Scottish Highlanders, romantic, brutish, and living in extremes. 

Reviewing the poetry and verse that survive from the Brontës’ tween and teen years, one can see the seeds of Wuthering Heights. 

Emily Brontë unfortunately was not able to escape an early death. She died at age 30 from tuberculosis, her death hastened by a harsh winter and contaminated water near the Brontë parsonage. She lives on in her poetry and prose.  

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Christopher Marlowe

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my love.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville, French politician and historian. 

Born in 1805 in France, Tocqueville’s lasting mark in history is his work De la démocratie en Amerique or Democracy in America. 

A typical aristocratic upbringing saw Tocqueville seamlessly enter politics. When Tocqueville was 26, the French Monarchy sent him and a partner to America. They were to study the American prisons and prison systems and report back. Tocqueville returned after nine months in North America and, three years later, published an account of his travels. Democracy in Ameri ca published in 1835 is not what the Monarchy had asked for, but it is undoubtably a more interesting read. 

Tocqueville did pursue a line of inquiry into American prisons, but he was much more impressed with cultural differences between America and Europe. Tocqueville found that while Europe clung to the vestiges of an idle aristocracy, American democracy championed and rewarded hard work. He noted that hard work in Europe was often looked down upon (for certainly if you were working so hard you must be poor). But Tocqueville noted a staunch individualism in America meant that men of all classes enjoyed a sense of dignity. The common man was lauded for dogged work ethic and was not afraid to defy elites or nay-sayers.

And today is the birthday of Maria Latigo Hernandez, Mexican-American activist. 

Born in 1896, just across the border in Mexico, Maria Latigo was a schoolteacher in her young teens. At 18 she fell in love with Pedro Hernandez from Texas. She moved to Texas to be with him and they were married not long after. 

Maria Latigo Hernandez was no dunce. Although her formal education was limited to small-town schools, her father was a professor. There’s no doubt he valued education and saw to it that his daughter was just as quick and intelligent as he was. 

She became keenly aware of the rife discrimination that Mexican Americans and African Americans faced in Texas. She and her husband got involved in politics when the last of her ten children were still babes. She became a force to be reckoned with and fought her whole life for civil rights. 

She believed strongly in the role of the mother in society. She argued in a 1945 essay that mothers (or the stay-at-home parent) were of the utmost importance to society as they wielded considerable influence over the next generation during their formative years. 

In 1968 at the age of 72, she testified to the United States Commission on Civil Rights that increased education for all children and adults was necessary in order to rewrite “deformed historical narrations.” She continued her activism until her death at age 99 and was known as an “untiring fighter.”

I Never Saw That Land Before

Edward Thomas

I never saw that land before, 

And now can never see it again; 

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar 

Endeared, by gladness and by pain, 

Great was the affection that I bore 

To the valley and the river small, 

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees, 

The chickens from the farmsteads, all 

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval; 

The blackthorns down along the brook 

With wounds yellow as crocuses 

Where yesterday the labourer's hook 

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze 

That hinted all and nothing spoke. 

I neither expected anything

Nor yet remembered: but some goal 

I touched then; and if I could sing 

What would not even whisper my soul 

As I went on my journeying, 

I should use, as the trees and birds did, 

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid 

Excepting from those like me made 

Who answer when such whispers bid.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of George Bernard Shaw, Irish-born English writer. He was a noted critic of music, plays, and art during his lifetime, but its his own plays that live on today. 

Born the youngest of three in 1856 in Dublin, his parents were already drifting apart. His father had married his mother hoping to see some of her family’s wealth; and his mother married his father to escape her overbearing family. It seems neither got what they wanted. 

When George was 6, his mother and her new beau, a man named George Lee, decided to move in together. Mrs. Shaw, Mr. Lee, and the three Shaw children shared two homes: one in an upper-class neighborhood in Dublin, and a cottage outside of town with a view of Killiney Bay. 

George preferred the cottage. Lee was a popular vocal teacher and conductor and it seemed, particularly in the city, there were always singers and players and music in the home. When his mother and/or sisters put George off in favor of practice or rehearsals, George took comfort in the music. 

A perk to living with such a popular maestro was an abundance of gifts from pupils. Mr. Lee, not particularly interested in reading, gave any books he received to George. George was delighted by this and read each book, getting to know a variety of genres.

[The reading proved a useful habit since George abhorred school. He said “Schools and schoolmasters are prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." To a child accustomed to much independence, formal schooling with lots of rules and regulations must certainly have seemed jail-like.]

In 1873, when George was 17, his mother and sisters followed Mr. Lee to London. A few years later, when George was 20, he also followed, leaving behind a steady but boring job. 

Shaw who said, “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing” did for a time, do nothing. When he first moved to London, he did not seek work, living with his mother rent free, perhaps spending most of his days reading and walking about. 

Work was finally hand-delivered to him. Mr. Lee had George ghost-write a music column for him. 

Shaw dabbled with writing his own novels and plays, but they weren’t very good. It wasn’t until the mid-1880s that two of his novels were published in serial form. 

In fact finally, in 1884 and 1885, Shaw found steady work as a critic of music and the theater. It seemed that being a critic ultimately drove Shaw to write seriously. He became frustrated with the Victorian theater’s “artificiality” and sought to create art that included a lesson or some teaching. He believed “all great art must be didactic.”

The turn of the century became a fertile period for Shaw and his output solidified him in the theater world. In 1926 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty."  By the time of Shaw’s passing at age 95, he had produced 62 plays of various length, including titles such as Pygmalion, Candida, and Saint Joan. 
 

There Will Come Soft Rains

Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend.

Today is the birthday of Rosalind Franklin, English chemist and X-ray crystallographer. 

Besides being instrumental to the discovery of DNA and its double-helix shape, Franklin had a rich life outside of her science work. One thing she enjoyed most was trekking. She would take off on multi-day trips with a backpack full of supplies and hike wherever was convenient. After a particularly stunning trek through the French Alps, Franklin declared “I am quite sure I could wander happily in France forever.” 

Despite James Watson’s critical account of Rosalind Franklin’s personality, by accounts of friends, she was truly fun. First there was her adventurous spirit as evidenced by her trekking. Second, her consorting with colleagues in America led them to think she had quite an entertaining sense of humor. In fact, Watson’s words regarding Rosalind in his biography are likely stained with self-importance. Francis Crick admits he and Watson treated Franklin with a “patronizing attitude.” 

Franklin and Crick and Crick’s wife enjoyed a friendship later on in life. During Franklin’s fight against cancer, likely caused by her exposure to X-rays, the Cricks spent plenty of time with her as she healed from a round of treatment. 

Today is the birthday of Maxfield Parrish, American artist and illustrator. 

Parrish was born in 1870 in Pennsylvania and raised in a Quaker Society. An early predilection for drawing was cheered on by his parents, his father being a painter.  His parents went so far as to take him to Europe to show him the great works of artists and helped him enroll at an art school in Paris for a time. 

He returned to America and pursued further art and design schooling in his teens and early 20s. He gladly took commissions and illustrated works such as an edition of Arabian Nights, Eugene Field’s Poems of Childhood, and Oz series author, Frank L. Baum’s book Mother Goose in Prose.

Besides illustrations for children’s books, calendars, magazines, and greeting cards, it’s Parrish’s painting that stands out as spectacular. His imaginative scenes combined with almost iridescent color, particularly the blue of the skies, earned him fortune and fame. His Quaker roots kept him humble, however, and he went so far as to say "I am hopelessly commonplace, I don't know what people see in me!" 

The blue in his paintings would come to be known as “Parrish blue” it was so unique and striking. Digital copies of his work don’t do his blue justice. Parrish would apply layers of glaze and varnish over a monochromatic color, the effect being that the color looks as fresh and vibrant 100 years later as it did when it was first applied. 

Parrish’s art is on display at museums across the country, including a beautiful piece titled Interlude at the Memorial Art Gallery in my hometown of Rochester, NY. (See this link for a few of his works and see this one for Interlude) 

And today is the birthday of Maria Weston Chapman, American abolitionist. One of her great achievements was editing, for nineteen years, The Liberty Bell, a ‘giftbook’ whose proceeds directly benefited the abolitionist cause. The Liberty Bell included works by writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who all contributed without payment and as a show of their support of the abolitionist cause.

A Baby Running Barefoot

D. H. Lawrence

When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass

The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,

They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;

And the sight of their white play among the grass

Is like a little robin’s song, winsome,

Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one flower

For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.

I long for the baby to wander hither to me

Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,

So that she can stand on my knee

With her little bare feet in my hands,

Cool like syringa buds,

Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.

Today is the birthday of French writer Alexandre Dumas. Notable titles include The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Prince of Thieves (a Robin Hood Tale), and a version of the Nutcracker. It was Dumas’s version of the classic tale that would be adapted into the Tchaikovsky opera of the same name in 1892. Scholars estimate that Dumas’s writing, in total, amounts to about 100,000 pages. 

But Dumas’s ancestors had a rocky start. His father was the child of a Haitian slave and her French master. Luckily, Dumas’s father was brought to France as a teen to attend a military training academy and enjoyed a prestigious career. Despite Dumas’s father’s complexion, he mixed in French high society, so that by Alexandre Dumas’s birth in 1802, the Dumas family was surrounded by fellow aristocrats, scholars, and artists. 

Dumas’s connections gave him a headstart and his plays and articles were instantly well-received. He began venturing out into novels in 1838, republishing a successful play as a novel in serial form. 

Dumas also did a fair bit of traveling through Europe, particularly as power struggles commenced in France. He was able to turn his traveling into profit, publishing travel guides and articles. In addition, his tales of adventure include characters that are well-versed in Mediterranean geography. 

As Dumas’s reputation spread, his novels were translated into multiple languages. He started a production company of sorts, hiring staff to help with his writing. He came up with story lines and oversaw all final drafts, but it’s safe to assume Dumas’s staff helped write some of those 100,000 pages. Dumas was financially successful and he was known to enjoy the luxurious comforts of life. He tended to spend a bit too generously, particularly on his friends, guests, and lovers. 

Despite success, Dumas still experienced discrimination due to his ethnic background. He was quite light-skinned in comparison with his father’s complexion, but nevertheless, haters hated. The only work that alluded to Dumas’s own personal struggle with identity and race was his novel, Georges. 

The prejudice he experienced did not affect his love life. Although he was married, Dumas enjoyed numerous affairs and fathered as many as 7 children out of wedlock, some he knew of and financially supported. Additional progeny were uncovered more recently by scholars. His behavior may sound rascally, but having amorous affairs was practically expected of the French aristocracy at the time.

At his death in 1870 at the age of 68, his fame had declined as literary tastes shifted. However, his works regained popularity. It is hard to resist a classic good-versus-evil, swashbuckling adventure? In 2002 on what would have been Dumas’s 200th Birthday, his ashes were moved to the Panthéon of Paris with much pomp and circumstance. 

According to an account of Dumas from a friend of his and fellow playwright, Dumas was “the most generous, large-hearted being in the world. He also was the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth.”

Sounds like Dumas would have been tickled to know the fuss made over him, 130 years after his death. 

 
Sonnet 116 [Let me not to the marriage of true minds]

William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 

Admit impediments. Love is not love 

Which alters when it alteration finds, 

Or bends with the remover to remove. 

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 

That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 

It is the star to every wand'ring bark, 

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 

Within his bending sickle's compass come; 

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 

But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 

If this be error and upon me prov'd, 

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.