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King George’s Giraffe

Posted in King George IV, PEOPLE, tagged Animals, Charles Dickens, George IV, giraffe, Grip the Raven, John Gould, London Zoological Society, taxidermist, taxidermy, Windsor Zoo, zoo on February 18, 2009| 1 Comment »

The Nubian Giraffe, by Jacques-Laurent Agasse (c.1827), depicts one of the three giraffes sent to Europe by Mehmet Ali Pasha. This one was received by George IV in London. The Egyptian cows in the background supplied the young giraffe with milk.

In my last two posts, I wrote about Charles Dickens and his pet raven, Grip. Upon Grip’s death in 1841, Charles Dickens couldn’t bear to part with his beloved pet so he had him stuffed and mounted in a glass case to display in his study. Dickens was one of many Brits caught up in the pet preservation craze popularized by King George IV of England (1762-1830).

George IV is credited with establishing a private zoo at the Sandpit Gate at the Windsor Great Park at Windsor Castle. His menagerie consisted of such exotics as “wapiti, sambur, zebus, gnus, quaggas,…’corine’ antelopes, llamas, wild swine, emus, ostriches, parrots, and waterfowl. There was also an ‘enormous tortoise.'” (1) The showpiece of his collection, however, was a female Nubian giraffe, or “cameleopard,” as it was sometimes called. A diplomatic gift from Mehmit Ali, Pasha of Egypt, this young specimen arrived in London on August 11, 1827, along with several cows that provided her with milk. The gift giraffe was only 18 months old yet ten and a half feet in height. She was the first giraffe ever seen in England. Till she arrived, “there was a general belief that descriptions of the giraffe were partly fabulous.” (2)

The State of the Giraffe, 1829, a caricature print by William Heath, showing George IV and Lady Conyngham trying to lift the giraffe by pulley

From the beginning, there was trouble. An artist commissioned to paint the giraffe’s portrait noticed that her lower limbs seemed deformed from injuries. Investigation revealed that, on part of her journey from Senaar to Cairo, she was borne on the back of a camel, the wounds being caused because her legs were lashed together under the camel’s body. (1) At Windsor Castle, she was much doted on and continued to live on cow’s milk. After two years, though, she became very debilitated from those early wounds and exercise became painful and hard. Someone came up with a plan to keep her moving. A gigantic triangle on wheels was constructed in which “the creature was somehow secured each day and trundled round her paddock, the hooves just touching the ground.” (1)

Despite the kind treatment, giraffes are accustomed to the warm, open savannahs of Africa, not the cold and wet confines of a British zoo. Two years after her arrival on the continent, the giraffe died, having only grown 18 inches while in captivity. It is said that King George IV had been obsessed with his giraffe and was distraught over her death. He commissioned the taxidermist John Gould to stuff his recently deceased pet giraffe.

The stuffer to the Zoological Society, Mr. Gould, has had the performing of his duty…Soon after the giraffe expired, De Ville, the modellist, was ordered down to Windsor, by His Majesty, and took a cast of the animal. From this cast a wooden form was manufactured, on which the skin of the animal is now placed, and which preserves its beauty in an extraordinary degree.

The Times, April 15, 1830

Pet preservation is still alive and well in the twenty-first century – stuffed is out, though, and freeze-dried is in.

(1) Kisling, Vernon N. From Zoo and Aquarium History.
(2) Thomas, William John: White, William: Doran, John; Turle, Henry Frederick. Notes and Queries.

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Grip the Raven

Posted in Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, PEOPLE, tagged Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens, Daniel Maclise, Edgar Allan Poe, gothic literature, Grip the Raven, Literature, pet raven, Poe Bicentennial, Poetry, stuffed animals, The Free Library in Philadelphia, The Raven on February 17, 2009| 10 Comments »

The Eldest Children of Charles Dickens with Pet Raven Grip by Daniel Maclise, 1941

The Eldest Children of Charles Dickens with Their Pet Raven "Grip" by Daniel Maclise, 1841

In yesterday’s post , I mentioned Grip the Raven, author Charles Dickens’ pet bird that was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven.” Dickens’ children loved the bird Grip although he did bite their ankles. At his children’s request, Dickens included Grip as a character in one of his books, Barnaby Rudge (1841). Dickens had three pet ravens, all named Grip. Grip I died in 1841, possibly because he ate lead chips scraped off a wall being repainted at the Dickens home. Dickens had the bird preserved and mounted in a glass case for display in his study. After Dickens’ death, a Poe collector acquired Grip I and donated him to the Free Library of Philadelphia where it remains today.

Dickens was saddened by Grip’s death. On March 12, 1841, he wrote the following letter to his friend, Daniel Maclise, who provided illustrations for his books and portraits of Dickens and his family, including the one on the left here featuring the eldest four of Dickens’ nine children: Charley, Mamie, Katey, and Walter. Dickens wrote:

Mr. Dear Maclise,

You will be greatly shocked and grieved to hear that the Raven is no more… On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but he soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along the coach-house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed “Halloa old girl!” (his favorite expression) and died. The children seem rather glad of it. He bit their ankles but that was play…”

You might well ask why Grip the Raven is part of an Edgar Allan Poe Collection in Philadelphia. Toward the end of his life, Poe was a paid literary critic. In this role, he reviewed Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, in which Grip the Raven plays a part. When Grip makes his first noise in the book, one of the characters says, “What was that — tapping at the door?” The answer is “‘Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter.” Poe’s criticism of Barnaby Rudge was that, although he liked the book overall, he felt that the raven’s “croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.”

Four years later, Poe published his most famous work, the poem  “The Raven,” which gave the raven a more central role. It features a tapping and talking raven who flies into a man’s room and perches on a bust of Pallas Athena. Dickens’ raven could speak many words and had many comic turns, including the popping of a champagne cork, but Poe emphasized the bird’s darker “devil-bird”qualities. His bird spoke only one word, “Nevermore.” Poe’s raven may have represented a messenger from hell or the after-life, mirroring the gloom and foreshadowing the doom of the troubled narrator who misses his beloved Lenore.



The Raven

verse 1

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door-
                Only this, and nothing more….”

verse 3

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”- here I opened wide the door;-
                Darkness there, and nothing more.

verse 4

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mienof lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-
                Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

1884 Illustration from "The Raven" by Gustave Dore

verse 5

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore-
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
                Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Edgar Allan Poe

1845

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Edgar Allan Poe’s Body

Posted in Edgar Allan Poe, PEOPLE, tagged Charles Dickens' pet raven Grip, Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven on February 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

2009 stamp

Philadelphia wants the body of Edgar Allan Poe but Baltimore isn’t giving it up. Poe didn’t live in Baltimore long, but ever since he died and was buried there in 1849, the city has claimed him for its own. Not fair, says Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar in Philadelphia. He argues that Philadelphia was Poe’s true home, seeing that he wrote his most famous works in Philadelphia where he lived from 1838-1844, including the stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

“So, Philadelphians, let’s hop in our cars, drive down I-95 and appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery,” Mr. Pettit wrote in an article in October. “I’ll bring the shovel.”

Not so fast, said Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House in Baltimore. “Philadelphia can keep its broken bell and its cheese steak, but Poe’s body isn’t going anywhere. If they want [another] body, they can have John Wilkes Booth,” referring to Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, who is also buried in Baltimore.

Charles Dickens' pet raven, Grip, and the inspiration behind Edgar Allan's poem, "The Raven"

Mr. Pettit didn’t really expect Poe’s body to be dug up and transferred to Philadelphia. He was merely starting a spirited debate to drum up interest in several Poe exhibits being held in Philadelphia this year to celebrate the bicentennial of the mystery writer’s birth. Among the many attractions was a show of artifacts that just recently closed at the Philadelphia Free Library. While Poe’s original manuscripts and first editions were hits with die-hard Poe fans, the star of the show was undeniably a stuffed bird, Grip, Charles Dickens’ pet raven and the inspiration behind Poe’s best-known work, “The Raven.”

Poe began writing “The Raven” in Philadelphia but published it in New York where he relocated. Therefore, New York can also lay claim to Poe. Then there’s Boston where he was born. Poe, though, were he consulted on the matter, would have described himself as a Virginian, because he grew up and began his writing career in Richmond. Even South Carolina could cash in on Poe’s fame. Poe was stationed in the Army on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, in 1827, and set “The Gold Bug” there. He also lived in Britain.

But Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College, says neither of his rival cities are deserving of Poe’s legacy. Boston was the site of Poe’s birth, stated Lewis, the only place where he was happy. Boston and only Boston was Poe’s true home. Poe was poor, alcoholic, and miserable in all those other cities, claimed Lewis. “Every single city inspired Poe because they were torturing him,” said Lewis, tongue-in-cheek.

The argument between the cities has spilled over into blogs and newspaper articles, giving Edgar Allan Poe a boost in popularity, a healthy result for all the cities claiming Poe as its favorite son.

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Annabel Lee

Posted in Edgar Allan Poe, PEOPLE on February 16, 2009| 4 Comments »

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Written the year of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, “Annabel Lee” is generally considered to be the last poem Poe wrote. We celebrated the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth last month, as he and Abraham Lincoln were both born in 1809. Poe’s most famous works are arguably his macabre stories such as “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and his haunting poem, “The Raven.” Poe is considered to be the founder of the modern detective mystery. His love poem, “Annabel Lee,” though, comes on softly, gently, unlike anything else I’ve ever read of his, though it is very sad. I read it to my daughter Katie many times when she was very young and she loved it.

Annabel Lee

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.

Edgar Allan Poe

1849

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III. Nellie Bly Lands in Egypt

Posted in Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, biographies of women, biographies of women journalists, Nellie Bly, the New York World on February 13, 2009| 5 Comments »

Upon return from her trip around the world, Nellie published an account of her travels

When we last left Nellie Bly, it was November 14, 1889 (see blog entries for Feb. 11 and 12) and she had just departed New York for Southhampton, England, on an ocean steamer. In the next thirteen days, Nellie crossed the Atlantic, took a train to London, a boat across the English Channel to Calais, France, and a train through France and Italy. In Brindisi, Italy, she caught another steamer for China, the Victoria. Along the way, she wrote an account of her travels and cabled them back to her editor at the New York World for publication. The trip caused a sensation back home as readers followed her adventures with relish.

Thirteen days into her journey, the steamer Victoria anchored at Port Said, Egypt, to take on coal. Nellie and her fellow passengers gathered on deck and gazed out on a wide, sandy beach and a few uninteresting houses. They gladly welcomed a change of scenery, though, and looked forward to some time on shore. Here is her account of that experience as recorded later in the book she wrote upon her return, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days:

Before the boat anchored the men armed themselves with canes, to keep off the beggars they said; and the women carried parasols for the same purpose. I had neither stick nor umbrella with me, and refused all offers to accept one for this occasion, having an idea, probably a wrong one, that a stick beats more ugliness into a person than it ever beats out.

Hardly had the anchor dropped than the ship was surrounded with a fleet of small boats, steered by half-clad Arabs, fighting, grabbing, pulling, yelling in their mad haste to be first. I never in my life saw such an exhibition of hungry greed for the few pence they expected to earn by taking the passengers ashore. Some boatmen actually pulled others out of their boats into the water in their frantic endeavors to steal each other’s places. When the ladder was lowered, numbers of them caught it and clung to it as if it meant life or death to them, and here they clung until the captain was compelled to order some sailors to beat the Arabs off, which they did with long poles, before the passengers dared venture forth. This dreadful exhibition made me feel that probably there was some justification in arming one’s self with a club.

Our party were about the first to go down the ladder to the boats. It had been our desire and intention to go ashore together, but when we stepped into the first boat some were caught by rival boatmen and literally dragged across to other boats. The men in the party used their sticks quite vigorously; all to no avail, and although I thought the conduct of the Arabs justified this harsh course of treatment, still I felt sorry to see it administered so freely and lavishly to those black, half-clad wretches, and marveled at their stubborn persistence even while cringing under the blows. Having our party divided there was nothing to do under the circumstances but to land and reunite on shore, so we ordered the Arabs to pull away. Midway between the Victoria and the shore the boatmen stopped and demanded their money in very plain and forcible English. We were completely at their mercy, as they would not land us either way until we paid what they asked. One of the Arabs told me that they had many years’ experience in dealing with the English and their sticks, and had learned by bitter lessons that if they landed an Englishman before he paid they would receive a stinging blow for their labor.

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The Heart of Abraham Lincoln

Posted in Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, PEOPLE on February 13, 2009| 2 Comments »

drawing of Abraham Lincoln as a boy

Today I want to get it just right. It is our precious Abe Lincoln’s 200th birthday. I want to choose just the right thing to say about him in this blog that does the great man justice, that gives us a look into his fine soul.

When I think of Lincoln, I think of his honesty, yes, his courage, of course, but mainly what comes to mind is his unfailing kindness – to Mary, his wife, when she was yelling at him while he was president and under the most terrific strain from the Civil War. He just shrugged off her verbal and sometimes physical assaults, picked up Willie or Tad and put them on his shoulders, and walked out of the room. He did not utter a harsh word at her. During his presidency, the White House was open to Civil War veterans and widows who wanted to meet with Lincoln. He would never refuse to see a one of them though he was terribly overworked, with little staff to help him run the country.

His kindness for the weakest among us showed up early in his youth. It is believed that his father Thomas Lincoln was ashamed that Abe was sensitive and fond of books, storytelling, and poetry, considering such interests “soft.” Thomas Lincoln felt contempt to discover such sentimentality in his own son. Lincoln and his father never were close. They remained isolated from one another from the time of Lincoln’s mother’s death when Abe was 9. The bad blood between them was never resolved. When Thomas Lincoln lay dying, Abraham refused a request to visit his father’s sickbed and did not attend his father’s funeral.

The following anecdote from Lincoln’s boyhood illustrates how his heart ached for the unfortunate:

He was always the champion of the helpless, no matter how humble the object of any ill-treatment might be. One day he came and caught a group of mischievous boys putting live coals on a poor mud-turtle’s back. The lads, and several girl friends, laughed to see the turtle moving slowly and aimlessly about in its surprise and misery. When Abe Lincoln saw what was going on he dashed into the group in a frenzy of wrath, snatched the shingle from the ringleader’s hand, dashed the burning coals off the poor turtle’s back, then began beating the boys with the thin board. When he had scattered them right and left, according to one of the girls who witnessed the sudden scene, “he preached against such cruelty” and, with angry tears in his deep gray eyes, told the snickering offenders that a terrapin’s or “an ant’s life is as sweet to it as ours is to us.” (1)

This boy champion of the underdog grew into a man and the 16th President of the United States of America. As a boy, he freed the turtle; as a man, he freed the slaves. Lincoln famously declared,

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Happy 200th Birthday, Abe Lincoln.

(1) Whipple, Wayne. The Heart of Lincoln. (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1915)

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II. Nellie Bly Packs

Posted in Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged biographies of women, biographies of women journalists on February 12, 2009| Leave a Comment »

cartoon-nellie-around-the-world Yesterday, you will recall, we followed famed stunt reporter Nellie Bly as she tried to convince her editor to let her make a journalistic trip around the world in less than 80 days. Perhaps you noticed that I left out some information in yesterday’s post. I wrote that Nellie Bly’s New York World editor had two objections to sending her on the trip yet I proceeded to list only one of them for my readers, that, for such a journey, her editor thought she needed a male protector.

This is what Nellie recalled her boss having said that day:

“It is impossible for you to do it,” was the terrible verdict. “In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. Besides you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this.”

Nellie vigorously objected and her editor relented, eventually warming to the idea. A year passed before any more was spoken about it. Then one cold evening, Nellie was summoned into her editor’s office. When she entered, he looked up from the paper he was writing and asked her, “Can you start around the world day after tomorrow?”

“I can start this minute,” she replied without hesitating. She recalled his second objection, that she would travel with too much baggage, and set out to conquer that problem.

Early the next morning Nellie went to a dressmaker and ordered a custom dress to be made for her immediately. The dressmaker was at her service instantly. Nellie explained to him that she needed a traveling outfit that could stand constant wear for three months. She was planning to go around the world in only one dress! After looking at several materials, the dressmaker selected two sensible fabrics: a plain blue broadcloth and a plaid camel’s hair. That afternoon, Nellie had her first fitting at 1:00, her second fitting at 5:00, and the dress was ready.

Nellie could then turn her attention to packing. She had bought one hand-bag and was determined to confine her baggage to its singular limit. “Packing that bag was the most difficult undertaking of my life….”

In her hand-bag, she packed:

two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink-stand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter.

That jar of cold cream was the bane of my existence. It seemed to take up more room than everything else in the bag and was always getting into just the place that would keep me from closing the satchel. Over my arm I carried a silk waterproof, the only provision I made against rainy weather.

She was given 200 lbs in English gold and Bank of England notes. She carried the gold in her pocket. The Bank of England notes she carried around her neck in a chamois-skin bag. She also took some American gold and paper money to see if it could be used at foreign ports. Her passport was in order. As she was traveling without an escort, a friend suggested that she carry a revolver, but Nellie refused to arm herself, saying she had a “strong belief in the world’s greeting” for her.

On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly set sail from New York for Southhampton, England, on the ocean steamer, the August Victoria.

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I. Nellie Bly Gets the Job

Posted in Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged Around the World in Eighty Days, biographies of women, biographies of women journalists, Jules Verne, Nellie Bly, New York World on February 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Nellie Bly

In 1888, stunt journalist Nellie Bly (see other entries in “Categories – Nellie Bly” in right sidebar) convinced her boss, the editor of the New York World, to send her on a trip around the world alone. She bet him that she could do it in eighty days or less. Where had she gotten this hairbrain scheme? From a book by Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days. She was always getting wild and crazy ideas for her newspaper stories. Remember, of course, that the year before she had posed as an lunatic to get committed to an insane asylum. She had also posed as an unwed mother to expose the black market baby adoption rackets.

Nellie’s editor liked her idea but had two concerns. He thought she would need a male protector, that she shouldn’t travel alone.

“Very well, start the man,” she said, “and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”

Her editor got the idea. He couldn’t afford to let Nellie Bly quit his paper and go to work for a rival. New York newspaper competition was fierce and Nellie Bly’s articles dramatically boosted circulation for the World. He gave her the assignment. A year later she was ready to go.

Next: Nellie in Egypt

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The First Lincoln Penny

Posted in Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, PEOPLE, tagged Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt on February 10, 2009| 2 Comments »

Taken by Alexander Gardner on February 9, 1864. This photograph would serve as the image that engraver Victor David Brenner would use to create the bas relief of Lincoln used on the penny.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)Taken by Alexander Gardner on February 9, 1864, this photograph served as the image engraver Victor David Brenner would use to create the bas relief of Lincoln found on the 1909 penny.

It is President Teddy Roosevelt we have to thank for giving us the first Lincoln penny. Until the Lincoln penny debuted in 1909, no likeness of an actual person had appeared on a “regular-denomination circulating United States coin.” Too monarchial, deemed our first head of state, George Washington. Emperors, kings, and other authority figures had long stamped coins with their images to declare their power. Young America was done with that kind of governing. So the Mint Act of 1792 dictated that American coins would instead be “an impression emblematic of liberty.”

As a result, the coin designs of liberty – depicted by goddesses, mainly- grew “dowdy and uninspired.” President Roosevelt complained to his secretary of the treasury that, “Our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness.” So Roosevelt directed him to stamp the image of Lincoln on the one-cent piece to commemorate Lincoln’s 100th birthday.

It was done. When the Lincoln penny was released into circulation, it was a hit with the American people. Long lines formed at banks and Treasury buildings in New York, Washington, Boston, and other cities to snap up the new coins. In Philadelphia, some of the pennies were sold for 25 cents. It had been 44 years since Lincoln was assassinated. He was an icon. People were excited that they recognized the face on the coin.

Of course, as Lincoln himself remarked, you can’t please all the people all the time. Some people grumbled about the new coin, Confederate veterans, of course, plus the New York Times, calling it “another ill-considered freak of Mr. Roosevelt’s will.”

Nowadays, the complaints about the penny are different. There are some people who want to get rid of the penny altogether. Due to the rising price of metal, the cost of making the “copper-coated zinc corpus” (1.4 cents) now exceeds its face value.

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Lincoln Memorial Mystery

Posted in Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, PEOPLE, tagged Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Chester French, Gallaudet, Lincoln Memorial, sign language on February 7, 2009| 7 Comments »

Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial

Tucked into the massive central hall of the Lincoln Memorial sits an imposing marble statue of Abraham Lincoln. Over Lincoln’s head is inscribed:

IN THIS TEMPLE

AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE

FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION

THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

IS ENSHRINED FOREVER

The statue stands over 19 feet tall. Lincoln is shown in a seated position, but, if he could get up, he would stand 28 feet tall. He wears an expression of firm determination, eyes fixed rather sadly looking out onto the National Mall toward the Washington Monument. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) began work on his design for the statue in 1915, making many bronze and plaster models. The sculptor consulted photographs by the well-known Civil War photographer Mathew Brady and used Lincoln’s life mask as well as casts of Lincoln’s own hands as models.

Lincoln's left hand

Now look at both of Lincoln’s hands. There’s a popular legend that Lincoln is shown using manual sign language to sign his initials, with his left hand shaped like the letter “A” and his right hand to form an “L.” The National Park Service denies that this is the case. There is no evidence that Daniel Chester French intended for Lincoln’s hands to be formed into sign language letters. Nevertheless, it’s possible. Believers point out that a National Geographic Society publication states that French had a son who was deaf – and French himself knew sign language. He would have had good reason to do so, too, to honor Lincoln, as it was President Lincoln who signed into law the ability for Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf, to grant college degrees.

Lincoln's right hand

There are those who say French did shape Lincoln’s hands in this fashion on purpose yet others insist he didn’t. There is, however, evidence he could have. French had used sign language in his sculptures before. In his 1889 portrait of deaf educator Thomas Gallaudet shown with his first student, Alice Cogswell, Gallaudet uses his right hand to make the sign for the letter “A” as Alice, too, makes the “A” sign with her right hand.

Thomas Gallaudet sculpture by Daniel Chester French

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New Lincoln Pennies On the Way

Posted in Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, PEOPLE, tagged Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Bicentennial, Lincoln pennies, Mary Todd Lincoln on February 6, 2009| 4 Comments »

penny-with-lincoln-memorial

In one week, the nation will celebrate the 200th birthday of our most revered president, Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 14, 1865). To commemorate the birthday of our 16th president and the issuing of the first penny a century ago, the U.S. Mint is issuing four new pennies. The “heads” side of the penny bearing Lincoln’s image remains the same while the “tails” side will alternate four new designs which represent the four major aspects of President Lincoln’s life:

Birth and early childhood in Kentucky (1809-1816)
Formative years in Indiana (1816-1830)
Professional Life in Illinois (1830-1861)
Presidency in Washington, DC (1861-1865)

Click here to see the unveiling of the images of the new coins at a ceremony held last September in Washington, D.C.

I hadn’t intended to write about Abe Lincoln today. Rather, for days now, I’ve gorged myself reading about his wife Mary, hoping soon to come to the end of the book and Internet material on her and get down to blogging. Well that is an impossible task. There is no end of Lincolnology. At last count, there were upward of 15,000 books about Abe and Mary, more than about any other person except Jesus.

A visit to the official website of the Lincoln Bicentennial assures me that I can blog all year on the Lincolns and be in step with the rest of the country, as celebrations and exhibits go on for the next eleven months.

While I was googling the image of the Lincoln Memorial which I present here, I got all misty-eyed.

Lincoln statue within the Lincoln Memorial

What a great man Abraham Lincoln was. After reading about his life with Mary, I come away with even more admiration. What a difficult woman Mary was and so selfish, too (see my Feb. 3, 2009 blog below). I’ll give her credit for her abolitionist efforts but what a drag she was on our president during the darkest time of our nation’s history! She was jealous of his time away from her. He was running the country!

When I was in elementary school, February was the month we celebrated two presidents’ birthdays – Lincoln’s on the 12th and Washington’s on the 22nd. This was before there was an official “Presidents’ Day,” a day set aside to celebrate the birth of all presidents and before February became “Black History Month.” My teachers would always have a beautiful bulletin board displayed with a calendar, white doilies with red hearts for Valentine’s Day, and black cardboard cut-outs of Lincoln’s and Washington’s silhouettes. I love February.

I learned that Lincoln was poor and lived in a log cabin, that he was humble, gave speeches outdoors, and chopped firewood. We heard the Mason Weems fable that Washington could not lie to his father about chopping down a cherry tree.

washington_cherry-tree

My birthday comes two days after Washington’s. As a result, I’ve always had cherry pie instead of cake for my special dessert, because of George chopping down that cherry tree. On one birthday, my grandmother Mimi made cherry tarts for my guests and me and we went to the movies to see Lucille Ball and Bob Hope in the comedy, “Fancy Pants.”

Back to the Lincoln penny, isn’t it ironic that a president who grew up “friendless, uneducated, penniless…” should find himself commemorated on a penny? Happy Early Birthday, Abe. You rock.

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The Obama Girls Dolls Revisited

Posted in Barack and Michelle Obama, PEOPLE, tagged Obama girls dolls on February 4, 2009| 2 Comments »

Ty, the company that makes Beanie Babies, is honoring First Lady Michelle Obama’s wishes and dropping the names “Marvelous Malia” and “Sweet Sasha” from its Ty Girlz collection. CEO Ty Warner still maintains that the dolls weren’t intended to look like Malia and Sasha Obama. The dolls will be renamed Mariah and Sydney.

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The Haunted Hotel

Posted in PEOPLE, tagged history, Paranormal Experiences, the Lodge at Cloudcroft on January 30, 2009| 7 Comments »

Jacob Marley's Ghost from A Christmas Carol by Dickens

Now I get to tell my ghost story. It happened in July of 1999. I remember the date exactly because my daughter Katie’s birthday is July 27. She, my husband, Tom, and I were taking a summer road trip up through El Paso to Santa Fe. Katie had her eleventh birthday while we were away and she wasn’t happy to be so far from home. She had wanted a birthday party back in Austin with her friends.

On our way up to Santa Fe, I had booked us a night at a famous and historic mountain inn in a little town in south central New Mexico, Cloudcroft. My uncle Max was once a forest ranger there. Nine thousand feet above sea level in the Sacramento Mountains and surrounded by 200,00 acres of the Lincoln National Forest, the Lodge also boasts a nine-hole golf course, a four-star restaurant, and a ghost named Rebecca – but I didn’t know the last part until the day of our arrival.

Established over a hundred years ago, The Lodge is very impressive – elegant, yet cozy. Inside and out, it looked just as you would expect a mountain inn to look. The lobby featured a stuffed and angry brown bear reared up on his back legs, a fireplace with a bright and shiny copper roof, and the head of a buck mounted on the wall. The decor was both Victorian and Southwestern with heavy dark wood furniture, thick pile carpet, and leather couches.

Guests are warmly welcomed. The reception area had a huge basket of red apples. I wanted one. I was carrying some green Granny Smith apples already in what Tom and Katie called my Mary Poppins bag. If you’ve seen the movie, “Mary Poppins,” you know what I’m describing. It’s a bottomless carpet bag. Anyway, the Granny Smith apples in my bag were for Tom but I don’t really like them. They’re too tart. I like red ones better and so does Katie. So I reached into the hospitality basket and helped myself to three or four red apples. I tucked them into my Mary Poppins bag. I tucked them down deep into the bottom below the magazines and books so they wouldn’t spill out and zipped the bag shut.

The Lodge at Cloudcroft, NM

We were shown to our guest room which faced the front. It was tucked into a dormer which meant the inner walls – covered with a Victorian printed wallpaper – were sloping. Tom and I were to share a four-poster queen bed while Katie had a window seat sleeping arrangement. We parked our bags – I heaved the Mary Poppins bag up onto a tall antique chest of drawers – and then we all went outside to explore.

The grounds were magnificent. We wandered onto the golf course. There were apple trees with little red and green crabapples weighing down their branches. I was from South Texas and had never seen apples growing on trees before although I was forty-four years old that summer! We walked around in the cool, crisp mountain air. It soon grew dark and our legs were tired from so much climbing, so we went inside for dinner.

In the dining room aptly named “Rebecca'” after the “ghost,” I had my first Spring Mix salad with raspberry vinaigrette. Back in Texas, we were still eating iceberg lettuce with Thousand Islands Dressing. The food and service were first class.

: “Rebecca”

The hotel was really capitalizing on the ghost of Rebecca theme. A painting of Rebecca hung in the restaurant. I asked the waiter if the rumors of a ghost were true. He said he had never seen the ghost himself but the chef had had some really weird supernatural encounters. He went and got the chef for me. The chef said that, on more than one occasion, knives had flown through the air of his kitchen right toward him. He was convinced the ghost was responsible. I chuckled and went back to my food.

After dinner, the others went upstairs to the room but I wandered into the gift shop. I browsed among the books where I found The Ghostly Register, by Arthur Myers. Chapter 43: “The Ghost Who Makes Phone Calls,” was devoted to the legend of Rebecca. The ghost they call Rebecca – no one has researched this – is believed to be the spirit of a chambermaid who was killed by her lumberjack lover when he found her in the arms of another in the early 1900s. Those who claim to have seen her wandering the halls of the Lodge describe her as a beautiful redhead who wears a long, flowing gown. Guests and employees have reported many unexplained happenings at the Lodge that they attribute to Rebecca – ashtrays that slide across tabletops unassisted, phones that ring yet no one is on the line, footsteps, and knockings on doors. She was often seen near Suite 101, the Governor’s Room. I bought the book and left.

I decided to conduct my own investigation of the ghost. This “ghost of maid killed by jealous lover” legend is attached to many hotels and I was sceptical that Rebecca was more than that. I wandered into the hallway of Suite 101. I hung around a while but everything seemed perfectly normal – no ectoplasm there – so I went upstairs to join the others. I found both Katie and Tom piled up their individual beds with books. I decided to get ready for bed and then join them.

After I’d changed into my nightgown, taken off my make-up, and washed my face, I was ready to climb up in bed alongside Tom with a good book. It was then that I remembered the juicy red apples in my Mary Poppins bag. I wanted one. I walked over to the chest of drawers.

Tom and Katie weren’t paying me any attention. They were still deeply absorbed in their reading. I grabbed my Mary Poppins bag and pulled it toward me. It was heavy. I got up on my tiptoes to peek inside the bag and tilted it toward me some so I’d see well enough to select a sweet red apple rather than one of Tom’s sour green ones. I found a nice red one, then rooted around inside some more until I’d found my book. I then pushed everything back down again in the bag and shoved it back in place on the dresser. I didn’t zip the bag shut this time, though; I left the mouth of it open.

I then turned and set my book on the bed, before padding off to the bathroom to wash my apple before eating it. I was surprised when I heard a couple of thuds behind me. Something had fallen on the floor. I turned to see two red apples rolling along the carpet behind me like bowling balls aimed right for my feet. I looked over at Tom first and then Katie but neither of them had moved a muscle. Nevertheless, it could have been a trick. I put my hands on my hips and asked, “Hey, who did that?”

“Who did what?” they both wanted to know.

“Threw those apples at me?” I pointed to the carpet where the two red apples now lay at rest.

“What are you talking about?” Katie asked. I told them what had happened, that I thought someone had thrown the apples at me.

They laughed. “Maybe you just left your bag open and they fell out,” volunteered Tom, wanting to get back to his reading.

I knew that wasn’t true. Those apples had definitely been hurled at me by someone or something, but I didn’t speak of the incident again that night. I didn’t want to scare Katie. Tom and Katie just resumed their reading and I joined them. When we turned out the lights, my heart beat hard in my chest, but I still didn’t reveal how frightening it was to be in the dark in that room in that hotel. But the next day, when we were checking out to head to Santa Fe, I took the lead and cancelled our reservations for the return trip. I wasn’t about to sleep another night under that roof. That place was definitely haunted. I didn’t know how that chef could show up to work each day knowing that each day might be his last, that he’d spend it dodging knives – or apples.

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Elke Sommer’s Ghost Story

Posted in PEOPLE, tagged biographies of actresses, biographies of women, Elke Sommer, history, Hollywood, true life ghost story on January 29, 2009| 34 Comments »

I was thinking it was time for a good ghost story. I was tossing around some ideas in my head when I recalled something I’d seen on TV as a child. Of course we didn’t have any Discovery Channel back then, but the program was definitely a documentary type. It featured haunted houses and the people who lived in them. I remember the narrator talked with a family who lived in a house in which a rocking chair rocked with no one sitting in it. That felt a little hokey so I wasn’t spooked. It was when the narrator interviewed a person I recognized that I scooted to the edge of my seat.

Sommer and Sellers in "A Shot in the Dark" (1964)

It was the beautiful, blonde, and sexy Hollywood actress Elke Sommer (b.1940). She was familiar to me because she had played the voluptuous maid Maria opposite Peter Sellers in the second Pink Panther movie, “A Shot in the Dark” (1964), which ReadersDigest.com names as one of the top funniest 50 films of all times. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Sellers) trails after Maria whom he suspects of committing multiple murders, one of which is in a nudist camp.There’s a hilarious scene of Maria and Clouseau fleeing through Paris naked. a-shot-in-the-dark-movie-poster

Anyway, Elke and her husband Hollywood columnist and Bogart’s best friend Joe Hyams (1923-2009) lived in Benedict Canyon in North Beverly Hills. They claimed that a ghost was living in their house. My husband Tom also remembers seeing the same show when he was young. “They (Elke and Joe) had a ghost in their dining room,” he recalled. “The chairs would move around at night. They would put marks on the floor below the chairs before they went to bed, then, the next morning, they’d look, and the chairs wouldn’t be standing on the marks anymore. The chairs would be all over the place.”

In the middle of the night, Elke and Joe would wake up to what sounded like a dinner party going on downstairs in the dining room, hearing voices, chairs scooting, glasses tinkling, and silverware clanging. Yet they would go downstairs and no one would be there. Elke said, “Things would move all the time and it would be very noisy and (it was) the usual poltergeist nonsense, you know.” (1) The ghost was described as being a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt. (2)

After battling the spirits with no relief, they called in some help, contacting the Parapsychological Institute at UCLA. When Life photographer Allan Grant arrived at the house to take some pictures, he was a sceptic – but not so when he left. He said:

Something happened that spooked me. On one roll of film that I shot in a particular room where they first spotted the ghost there were about four or five frames of film that were progressively fogged down to the end of the frame, giving it a ghostlike appearance, especially (of) Joe Hyams, who was in the shot. When that was processed and I took a look at it, I thought, there’s no way that would happen…in the center of a roll…something else had happened that I couldn’t explain and I’ve spent years as a photographer and that had never happened to me before….Something did happen in that house. (1)

The haunting continued. A mysterious fire erupted one night. Fortunately, Joe and Elke were able to get out through a window. Shortly thereafter, they moved out of the house permanently. (1) Joe Hyams wrote a book about it called The Day I Gave Up the Ghost. Evidently, though, the ghost didn’t give up. The “severely haunted house” at 2633 Benedict Canyon “was bought and sold more than seventeen times since Sommers vacated it, and many have reported ghostly phenomena.” (3)

(1) youtube interview: “Actress Elke Sommer with a Poltergeist.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRLasAUl-eI
(2) California Paranormal Travel Guide.
http://www.haunted-places.com/californ.htm
(3) Ghosts of Hollywood: Celebrities Who Have Seen Ghosts. http://paranormal.about.com/cs/trueghoststories/a/aa022304_3.htm

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Dina Vierny, Artist’s Muse (1920-2009)

Posted in Dina Vierny, muse, PEOPLE, tagged Aristide Maillol, Art, biography of women, Dina Vierny, history, muses on January 28, 2009| 3 Comments »

Dina Vierny in January 1944 with the sculptor Aristide Maillol.

I came across this fascinating obituary by William Grimes in yesterday’s New York Times:
“Dina Vierny, the model whose ample flesh and soft curves inspired the sculptor Aristide Maillol, rejuvenating his career, and who eventually founded a museum dedicated to his work, died on Jan. 20 in Paris. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, which she founded in 1995.

In the same period when she was modeling, Ms. Vierny, who had joined the Resistance early on during World War II, led refugees from Nazism across the Pyrenees into Spain as part of an American organization operating out of Marseille.

Ms. Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father’s, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums.

“Mademoiselle, it is said that you look like a Maillol and a Renoir,” Maillol wrote to her. “I’d be satisfied with a Renoir.”

For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Ms. Vierny was Maillol’s muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic.

Maillol threw himself into his sculpture with renewed energy and, at Ms. Vierny’s urging, began painting again. After his death, she worked tirelessly to promote his art and enhance his reputation, eventually creating the Maillol Museum and donating 18 sculptures to the French government on the condition that they be placed in the Jardin des Tuileries. She later added two more.

Ms. Vierny was born in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, in 1919 and was taken by her parents to France when she was a child. Her father, who played the piano at movie houses, made a modest living while opening his home to an entertaining collection of artists and writers.

Ms. Vierny, who was intent on studying physics and chemistry, took to the role of artist’s muse reluctantly at first, posing during school vacations and glancing sideways at her schoolbooks on a nearby stand. The generous modeling fees and Maillol’s sense of fun won her over.

For the first two years, though, she kept her clothes on, not out of modesty — she and her friends belonged to a nudist club — but because of Maillol’s timidity. She herself later proposed that he try some nude studies. “Since he never asked, I figured he would never have the courage,” she told National Public Radio last year.

The Mountain,” one of Maillol’s depictions of Ms. Vierny

Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, “a living Maillol,” memorialized in works like “The Seated Bather,” “The Mountain,” “Air,” “The River,” and “Harmony,” his last, unfinished sculpture. Maillol also turned to her as a subject for drawings and painted portraits, like “Dina With a Scarf,” now in the Maillol Museum.

In 1939, Maillol took refuge at his home in Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, Ms. Vierny, who had already begun working for a Resistance group in Paris, was approached by the Harvard-educated classicist Varian Fry, whose organization in Marseille helped smuggle refugees from occupied France into Spain. Unbeknownst to Maillol, she began working as a guide, identifiable to her fleeing charges by her red dress. The work was doubly dangerous because she was Jewish.

Ms. Vierny soon began dozing off at her posing sessions. The story came out, and Maillol, a native of the region, showed her secret shortcuts, smugglers’ routes and goat paths to use. After several months of working for the Comité Fry, Ms. Vierny was arrested by the French police, who seized her correspondence with her friends in the Surrealist movement but failed to notice stacks of forged passports in her room.

A lawyer hired by Maillol won her acquittal at trial, and to keep her out of harm’s way the artist sent her to pose for Matisse in Nice. “I am sending you the subject of my work,” Maillol told Matisse, “whom you will reduce to a line.”

Matisse did several drawings and proposed an ambitious painting that he called a “Matisse Olympia,” after the famous painting by Manet. When Maillol heard that the project would take at least six months, he hastily recalled her to Banyuls.

She also posed for Dufy and for Bonnard, who used her as the model for “Somber Nude.”

In 1943, Ms. Vierny was again arrested, this time by the Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six months in prison when Maillol appealed to Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.

After the war, Ms. Vierny opened an art gallery in Paris, where she exhibited Maillol’s work, as well as that of others. After traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, she began collecting and showing work by dissident artists like Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov.

A passionate and unpredictable collector, Ms. Vierny accumulated no fewer than 90 antique carriages, including the omnibus that Toulouse-Lautrec used to pick up his friends and the carriage used by Chateaubriand when he was ambassador to Italy.

In the early 1970s, Ms. Vierny decided to start a Maillol museum. She began buying up apartments on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris, selling off her collection of 654 dolls along the way. In 1995 she opened the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, whose permanent collection also includes work by Degas, Kandinsky, Picasso, Duchamp and assorted naïve artists, yet another of Ms. Vierny’s enthusiasms.

It was at the museum that Ms. Vierny lived the rest of her life. She is survived by her two sons, Olivier Lorquin, the director of the Maillol Museum, and the art historian Bertrand Lorquin, its curator. The Maillol connection continues after her death. It may even have preceded her birth.

“One day, I was climbing up an almond tree and Maillol turned to my father,” Ms. Vierny told The Independent of London in 1996. “He said to him, ‘You made her, but it was I who invented her.’ And he really did believe that he had invented me. He said that he had been drawing my features for 20 years before my birth.”