Tag:

Smith College

What the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges in New England Said in 1972

In 1972, undergraduates at the Yale Daily News published The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, an entertaining but blatantly sexist description of what it was really like to attend several hundred colleges.

The Yale newspaper continues to publish an annual Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, one far more anodyne and less offensive than its earliest version. Imagine such a publication today describing Trinity College coeds as “unattractive.”

That first Insider’s Guide actually contained the sentence, “One [Trinity] history professor explained, ‘These girls don’t have to worry about being molested. Their faces are their chaperones’.” Really.

Many schools were going coed at the time, and women and minorities clamored for fair treatment. And yet it apparently didn’t occur to the editors of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges that they might offend female readers with comments like, “The young ladies are especially warm and are reportedly easily convinced of the virtues of losing their virtue.”

Colleges in the early 1970s were loosening their rules in the midst of the sexual revolution. And campuses all over the country were reeling from the unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges found an audience for answers to such questions as “Do students smoke pot?” “How hard is it to get a date?” “Do the dorms have curfews?”

Yale campus

Insider’s Guide to the Colleges

Tufts, which had gone coed, could be better than Williams or Wesleyan for men because, “There is something discouraging about the wild-eyed, hangdog look students develop at those isolated, all-male institutions,” the Insider’s Guide reported.

Bennington College won praise for its relaxed parietals. About the only rule it had was to ban lighted candles in dormitories.

Back then, people considered Bennington expensive at $5,000 a year for tuition, and you could go to UMass for $1,000 if you lived in state.

Sports didn’t get much attention at UConn.

And something else has changed since then. The Insider’s Guide described “the perennial middle class,” with rising expectations and hopes. It turned out to be not so perennial, after all.

Below are excerpts from the guide about New England colleges.

Amherst College

1250 men.

Amherst men tend to be strapping, athletic, handsome, friendly, preppy types of guys. They study hard but not too much, and they owe much of their image to the prep-school students – a third of the student body. The college held frequent lectures, rock-and-roll concerts, dances and mixers that the students from three nearby colleges attend.

“Another advantage we should mention is the active drug trade in the area – if you’re interested in that sort of thing,” wrote the Insider’s Guide.

Bates

650 men, 550 women.

The authors lumped Bates with small, out-of-the-way liberal arts colleges that had a good reputation. Bates was ‘superintellectual’ with no social life. Lewiston, Maine, was a hole, and the dull campus ‘unceasingly Georgian.’ The male-female ratio at Bates, provided ‘virtually unparalleleld social boredom.’ (But not for the female students, presumably. There were 650 men, 550 women.)

The school won praise for its many academic offerings and Robert Chute, a poet and scientist on the faculty. The administration, though, was characterized as autocrats who won’t retire ungracefully resist change and make everyone else uncomfortable.

Bennington

61 men, 500 women.

Bennngton, wrote the Yalies, was a peculiar place where both pot-smoking and touch football were on the rise. But whether a student would enjoy Vermont’s rural beauty depended on the ability to endure mud – and the near-constant bombardment of music and dance. For the Bennington girl of limited patience, the authors recommended a car – or a jet.

The unstructured college had no grades and no traditional organizations, though the students took their studies seriously. The Insider’s Guide included an anecdote about a ‘coed’ (male student) caught by a female student emerging from the shower naked. She smiled, said “hi” and walked past.

Boston College

4772 men, 1780 women.

Any school in or near Boston got a thumbs up from the authors because of the lively cultural offerings and preponderance of students. They simply described Boston College as Catholic, a university and located in Boston, actually Chestnut Hill. “But 25 cents and 20 minutes on the MTA will get you to Boston,” they note.

Boston University

6,070 men, 8,582 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges called Boston University a typical big urban university. Hungry hordes of Harvard and MIT men are the bane of a BU man’s existence, noted the authors. The school has strong offerings in political science and fine arts. It’s so big, you can take many course offerings, including an African language. But you can be as forgotten as an MTA schedule.

Bowdoin

947 men, 96 women.

“The premier reform this past year was the welcome arrival to the Maine wilderness of 100 bright-eyed damsels,” reported the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Bowdoin attracted intelligent, affluent middle-class types. Ten percent of its students were black as a result of a massive student recruiting program begun by the mostly white class of 1965. Additionally, Bowdoin had considerable academic strengths, strong fraternities and an overemphasis on sports – “albeit out of proportion to any actual quality on the part of the teams.”

Bowdoin

Brandeis

1,100 men, 1,100 women.

Brandeis in 1972 was a New York Times kind of place. High-scoring Jewish kids from New York and Boston apply to Brandeis, along with one Ivy, usually Columbia. A confrontation took place in 1969, when African-American students occupied the communications building in a demand for Afro-American studies. The president gave the students amnesty and tried to reconcile with them. The Yale students called him, ‘an extreme in-vogue liberal.’

Brown

2,800 men, 1,150 women.

Brown had just merged with Pembroke, and Brown men held some antipathy toward the former Pembrokers. The men resented their academic success, and preferred to date women from other schools on weekends, the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges reported.

“The problem with the coeducational experience is those women actually want to learn things,” wrote the Yale students. And yet, they concluded, the Brown experience is far from oppressive.

Main Green at Brown

Central Connecticut State College (now University)

3,417 men, 3,275 women.

What is now Central Connecticut State University was then described as, ‘a hodgepodge of new programs, archaic majors and overcrowded classes.’ CCSC experienced growing pains as it planned to double in size, resulting in, ‘an irritating mixture of the academic and practical. Experiencing growing pains as it planned to double in size.

Clark

958 men, 716 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the College reported that Clark’s fastidious admissions department had done a unique job in picking extremely individualistic people. It praised the school for its psychology and geography departments, and cited the Heinz Werner Institute as one of the finest research centers for developmental and comparative psychology. Clark, the guide concluded, offered a top education and a social wasteland.

Colby

837 men, 697 women.

The Insider’s Guide had no love for Colby, described as having apathetic students, a dissatisfied faculty and not much to do in Maine. The college also still gave preferential treatment to alumni offspring.

Connecticut College

359 men, 1175 women.

Recently shed of its ‘for Women’ name, Connecticut College competed with seven sister schools for students because of its outstanding faculty. And it did it despite lacking the luster of Vassar, the notoriety of Sarah Lawrence or the location of Radcliffe. Doris Day girl-next-door predominated on campus, but the problem is Connecticut College isn’t really next to anything. It cannot escape New London, the guide concluded.

University of Connecticut

7,863 men, 5,159 women.

One student summed up the school in five words. “I like UConn. It’s fun.” It was a typical huge state university, though hugely ridden with strife. One-third of the students left every year for academic reasons. Sports, the Insider’s Guide reported, were ‘little heard of.’

Dartmouth

3500 men.

Dartmouth had earned a reputation as an animal school, full of men who can’t control themselves when they get within a certain distance of woman. One freshman class was said to have more than 100 high school football captains, the guide reported.

But the authors acknowledged change at Dartmouth. Students devoted a recent Green Key weekend to workshops on Kent State, Cambodia and the Black Panthers. Almost as an afterthought, they add Dartmouth offered a superb education with an especially good math department.

East campus, Dartmouth

University of Hartford

1807 men, 1440 women.

U-Har was steeped in the finest traditions of suburbia and the American dream, wrote the Insider’s Guide. Located in the wealthy suburb of West Hartford, it stood among three excellent golf courses. The campus had a bourgeois air, but the student quality was improving and so were the academic departments. Plus, noted the guide, “You can have a good-as-hell time.”

Harvard

4,700 men.

The Yale authors offered four advantages to Harvard: interesting and diverse undergraduates, Boston location, prestige and a fair education without working too hard. Among the disadvantages: graduate students often taught undergraduates. Plus Harvard students tend to be obnoxious big shots. The campus was divided into wonks, jocks and preppies, so it was easy to wash out socially.

Another drawback: Though swarming with girls, Harvard ordered all girls out of the rooms at midnight.

“You can get better higher learning elsewhere,” the authors snarkily concluded.

Holy Cross

2,400 men.

Holy Cross has not wavered in its intent of educating concerned Christian gentlemen, wrote the guide. The school’s social life disappointed, but promised to improve soon with the introduction of coeds in 1973.

University of Maine at Orono

4,025 men, 3,000 women.

Though it offered a course in meat cutting, UMO ranked among the better state universities. And the gap between rules and reality bordered on the unbelievable. Liquor was forbidden on campus, but the ban was observed as well as the speed limit on the Maine Turnpike, noted the guide.

The students enjoyed skiing, and drinking ranked as the most popular activity on campus. In many ways, though, Orono was a relic from another age, when jocks score well and ROTC remained untarnished. Spanky and Our Gang was the last group to play there, and the political and cultural revolution had only begun to penetrate the Maine woods.

Hannibal Hamlin Hall at UMO

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3,825 men, 250 female.

MIT, a science school, was one of the finest in the country. It had its drawbacks, though. Once girls found you out as a Tech Tool, they won’t look your way. But ‘across a short span of aqueous filth known as the Charles River lies the City of Boston,’ report the authors of the Insider’s Guide. The Boston-Cambridge metropolis included 52 girls’ schools, however, making a 5-to-1 ratio in favor of the men.

At a time when authorities tried to weed out radicals from college campuses, MIT gave refuge to Noam Chomsky. Someone calculated Chomsky cost the school $1 million in government contracts and alumni giving. “We think it’s a credit to the school that they keep him on,” wrote the clearly left-leaning authors of the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges.

Massachusetts State College System

500-4,300 students.

Massachusetts’ state colleges offered a refuge from the modern world, wrote the Yale students. Their seven campuses were sound, secluded, white and straight. As state colleges went, Mass State ranked among the best of the lot. It was good academically, and highly competent in the training of teachers. Campus rules, though, rated ‘puritanical.’

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

8581 m, 6505 f

UMass-Amherst actually boasted lower acceptance rates than Harvard or Yale. Nonetheless, the Yale students dismissed UMass’s average student as ‘boorish, not very intelligent and not very interesting.’ However, some students living off campus were doing ‘amazing things.’ The guide described those amazing things as ‘writing poetry, painting and smoking dope.’

Middlebury

1,000 men, 700 women.

The Insider’s Guide described Middlebury as ‘clean, conventional, self-satisfied.’ Surrounded by cows and farmland, the academically demanding school put students under intense pressure. Middlebury was also famous for its foreign language and literature programs.

The Emma Willard House at Middlebury.

Mount Holyoke

1,750 women.

Mount Holyoke deliberately placed itself in South Hadley, Mass., far from the corrupting influence of uncensored literature, alcohol and men. All that changed, and the school was replacing the ‘creative but frustrated Emily Dickinson image’ with something more progressive, the guide reported. Despite a remarkable offering of student activities, ‘a flock of females in full flight’ might trample someone standing by the bus stop at the main gate on a Friday afternoon.

University of New Hampshire

5,163 men, 3,672 women.

Back in the early 1970s, the conservative Legislature and apartheid-supporting Manchester Union-Leader harbored much hostility toward students and universities, the guide reported. The school had the highest out-of-state tuition in the country and steep in-state tuition. It also had a lousy location, as Durham had no discotheques.

UNH had some pluses: a pretty campus and an excellent philosophy department under Peter Sylvester. Students generally came in the ‘apple-cheeked farm’ type.

Thompson Hall at UNH

Northeastern

9,400 men, 4,600 women.

Northeastern, reported the guide, was large, mediocre and sometimes troubled. But it was also on the way up. The co-op program launched some students into journalism, television and Wall Street, along with ‘palatable’ jobs for many others. On the downside: a location in a high-cost, low-quality, unsafe neighborhood.

Radcliffe

1250 women.

“Many Cliffies are as hip as they are huggable,” the Insider’s Guide reported. However, the old image of Radcliffe as a polite, restrained school for wealthy women hadn’t entirely disappeared.

Moreover, Radcliffe girls were aggressive, and Tillie-from-the-sticks would have had a hard time of it. The school also had a larger proportion of rugged, gutsy, infighting radicals than Harvard.

University of Rhode Island

5,907 men, 4,338 women.

URI fit the description of the state U in every respect, according to the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Except, perhaps, that it was a ‘surprisingly dull place aided by gifted administration.’

The book praised President Werner Baum for refusing to turn over a list of guest speakers and their fees to the attorney general. He wanted to search for subsidies of radicals and take away the school’s tax-exempt status. On the other hand, the administration enforced curfew, parietals and a ban on liquor at fraternities. URI also got low marks for its location in Kingston, which had little more than cow pastures, farmland and a pizza place.

URI Quadrangle

Simmons

1475 women.

Simmons tries to train women professionally while giving them a liberal arts background. It had recruited more black and underprivileged students than any other women’s college. The students got very involved in the issues of the day, just not on campus. Located in Boston, they will never lack for dates.

Smith

50 men, 2,450 women.

Smithies, wrote the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, are “prim, pretty, young, innocent, apple-cheeked, bubbling and dull.” The admissions office prefers girls who more resemble Mary Poppins than Scarlett O’Hara, they noted. Smith offers bookish seclusion, once considered the ideal women’s education. But now, they wrote, people think education is about “people, experiences, excitement and initiation.”

Trinity

1060 men, 530 women.

Trinity, noted the Yale newsmen, had a chip on its shoulder because it got left out of the Little Three Ivies — Amherst, Wesleyan and Williams. So it made up for it in social prestige. Trinity decided to give each man a bedroom, a living room and a bedroom for his valet. Times had changed by 1972, however. Trinity was trying to diversify its student body, which it held to rigorous admission standards.

Tufts/Jackson

2,400 men, 1,100 women.

Tufts got high marks for location and student body mixture. Described as a “good school,” it had proximity to Boston where something cool and something groovy was always going on.

Wellesley

1750 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges described Wellesley as almost a cartoon of the Ideal Respectable Yet Academically Worthwhile School for Young Ladies. It described many of the girls as Junior League liberals — idealistic, but they don’t do anything about it. The college had topflight offerings in English, history, the arts and languages, but showed weakness in science and math.

Wellesley College

Wesleyan

1200 men, 200 women.

Though Middletown, Conn., offered nothing but boredom, half the students at Wesleyan had cars. The school had the highest percentage of black students in the country – nearly 15 percent – outside of historically black colleges. Though occasionally too liberal for older alumni, Wesleyan then was “one of the most exciting academic centers” in the United States.

Wheaton

1200 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges had no love for Wheaton, which it described as a suitcase school that offered a solid liberal arts education with little pressure. Norton, Conn., however, was a difficult handicap to overcome.

Williams

1200 men, 325 women.

Williams offered a topnotch education, and would give Yale or Harvard a run for their money if it were bigger. The administration considered teaching more important than research, and prominent political scientist James MacGregor Burns taught there. Williams’ rural location was a drawback, however. Williams students’ parents supposedly sent their sons to college in the fall with a briar pipe and three-piece woolen underwear. Then they could count the days until spring thaw.

Yale

4,000 men, 1,000 women.

You would be correct in assuming the writers from the Yale Daily News would brag on their school. They noted that Yale was the hardest college to get into. They attributed that, in part, to the school’s sensitive and liberal administration which had quelled unrest during a three-week strike related to a Black Panther trial nearby. Its upper-middle-class students longed to fill the shoes of such public servants as Cyrus Vance, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Sargent Shriver. (Certainly Law School students Bill and Hillary Clinton did.)

Old campus of Yale University

They described Yale as a cross between Princeton and Harvard. It had the best English department in the world, the best French department outside of France and outstanding history, political science and biology departments. As far as social life went, Yale had a large “hippie-radical-drug-freak contingent” and “a monarchist party known as the Party of the Right.”

Images: Smith College campus By MonsieurNapoléon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64894359; Yale, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33181529. Yale campus Yale campus By Namkota – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50507969.. Wellesley College By Grom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6424795. Brown’s Main Green By Chris Rycroft – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/51768485409/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113810038. URI quadrangle By Wasted Time R – en:Image:URIQuad.jpg, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=891529. Thompson Hall Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225.. University of Maine CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898. The Willard House in Middlebury By PenelopeIsMe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4363690. Bowdoin By Polarbear 11 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14571061.

This story about the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges was updated in 2023.

0 comment 1.2k views

Charles Lindbergh and the Other Kidnapping

The kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby rocked the world in 1932. But three years earlier it was Lindbergh’s sister-in-law who faced a kidnapping threat.

Constance Morrow was the younger sister of Anne Morrow, who would marry Lindbergh in May of 1929. In April of that year, Lindbergh had to come to the rescue of his future sister-in-law.

charles lindbergh Constance Morrow, then 15, was a student at Massachusetts’ Milton Academy. She received a chilling letter in the mail: “You read this and keep your mouth closed. Don’t open your trap to a living soul or it will be your last talk. Your father has plenty of money. Do as you’re instructed and no harm will come to you…”

The letter writer instructed Constance to gather $50,000 and place it in a stone wall in Westwood, Mass. If she did not, she would be kidnapped and killed.

An Unsolved Disappearance

The letter also made an allusion to another girl, Frances St. John Smith, who had disappeared from Smith College just one year earlier. Smith’s body was later found in the Connecticut River. Smith had been a classmate of another Morrow sister, Elisabeth. Smith, the writer alleged, had received a similar extortion threat but had gone to the police. She had been killed for it, the letter implied.

The Morrows were the daughters of Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow. He was a partner at banking firm J.P. Morgan and one of the richest men in New Jersey. He would later become a U.S. Senator and was, at the time of the threat, ambassador to Mexico.

Constance Morrow reported the threat to her father, and he arranged for security. The police also staged a carefully orchestrated ransom drop. A girl was recruited who looked almost exactly like Constance Morrow. She drove from the Morrow home to Westwood, Mass. and left a bag in the stone wall as instructed.

Next, the police watched and waited. Though several people passed by the stone wall, no one stopped to pick up the money.

Charles Lindbergh Flees to Maine

The Morrows waited in New Jersey for any word. They began to grow concerned. If the extortionists had figured out they had gone to police, they feared Constance might be targeted for retaliation as the letter had promised.

Compounding their troubles, Anne Morrow had just become a household name as she was engaged to Charles Lindbergh, a worldwide celebrity for being the first pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The press was waiting for any hint of the couple’s wedding date.

Lindbergh crafted a plan to get the Morrows to safety. He arranged to borrow a plane so that no one would notice his aircraft was missing, and he piloted the Morrow girls and their mother to the family’s summer home on the small island of North Haven, Maine. There they hoped to hide out unnoticed until the kidnappers were caught.

But even on North Haven Charles Lindbergh was well known. There was no hiding for the world famous aviator and word leaked out that the Morrows were there with the world-famous pilot. Constance’s father Dwight stirred more interest in what was going on when he left his post in Mexico and traveled to Maine.

Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A Wedding Takes Center Stage

The Morrows managed to keep the blackmail/kidnap plot a secret, but Lindbergh and the Morrows were catnip to the press, which assumed the abrupt departure for Maine was tied in with Anne and Charles’ wedding. The family put an end to the media circus by returning to New Jersey. They announced on May 29 that Charles and Anne had married and were on a honeymoon.

As for the would-be kidnapper, he was never caught. Detectives thought they had the man when they apprehended a stranger on North Haven and incarcerated him in the town hall for several hours. But he turned out to be an inventor who wanted to talk to Lindbergh about investing in a product he was developing.

The private detectives later found several other victims of the blackmailer/kidnapper around Boston who received similar letters, but they never traced them to the culprit.

Thanks to The Snatch Racket, Edward Dean Sullivan.

Image of Charles and Anne Lindbergh PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5120858. This story updated in 2022.

1 comment 741 views

How the Real Miss Rumphius Decorated Maine With Lupines

There was a real Miss Rumphius who lived in Christmas Cove and secretly planted lupine seeds to adorn Maine’s roadsides and meadows.

The fake Miss Rumphius was the subject of a 1982 children’s book written by Barbara Cooney.

The real Miss Rumphius is at least partly responsible for the gorgeous show of lupines throughout Maine’s countryside in early summer. The wildflowers thrive in Maine, but they aren’t native to the state. How they got there and spread in such profusion is a mystery explained only by – well, an old lady who was the real Miss Rumphius.

Lupines in Maine

The Real Miss Rumphius

Hilda Edwards arrived in South Bristol, Maine, from Bristol, England, in 1904, at the age of 15.

There were no roads to Christmas Cove. Hilda Edwards had to take a train to Newcastle and then a mail launch down the Damariscotta River.

Her uncle, Smith College professor Harry Norman Gardiner, had invited her to stay in his remote cottage on Jupiter Knoll at Christmas Cove. Explorer John Smith had named the inlet after discovering it on Christmas Day.

Christmas Cove in 1906

Hilda Edwards graduated from Smith in 1912 and in 1915 married Talbot Faulkner Hamlin. He was a professor and librarian at Columbia University and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

Like Miss Rumphius, Hilda Hamlin traveled widely, though with her husband and three sons.

After leaving her husband in Paris in 1926, she audited courses at Smith, but still came to the little cottage on Christmas Cove in summertime. She began planting lupine seeds imported from her native England. Every August she cut bundles of lupine stalks and shook out their seeds over a wider space.

Then she began putting seeds in her pocket when she walked to the post office and strewing them along the roadside. She did it in secret, rarely telling anyone about her lupine obsession. Some friends knew. The real Miss Rumphius didn’t drive, and when friends gave her a ride they’d catch her tossing lupine seeds out the window. They called her ‘Hilda Lupina’ or the ‘Lupine Lady.’

Lupine Lady

More lupines

Lupinus polyphyllus are three to six feet tall and stand erect, with leaves below the flower stalk. Their two-foot-long, spiky flowers are blue, purple, rose and white. Lupines were planted in Europe to stabilize soils and to feed animals, but they’re considered a problem in Lithuania because they crowd out forest herbs. Bears like to eat their roots.

Researchers say they arrived in Maine sometime around 1950 – when the real Miss Rumphius entered her 60s — and spread along the Maine coast.

“Many a motorist with a botanical eye pulls into a gas station for an explanation of the display,” wrote W. Storrs Lee in a 1971 article for Yankee magazine. He had visited Hilda Hamlin for an interview, noting the spectacular display of lupines along Route 129. He also noted a handwritten sign next to a woodpile: “If friends of Hilda Hamlin would tote a few sticks of wood to her cottage, they would be doubly welcome.”

Secret Garden

Hamlin, not yet immortalized as Miss Rumphius, kept her gardening a secret from the world. There’d been one exception, wrote Lee. She was on her way to the post office when a ‘regular old-time school marm’ stopped her Model T and asked her to explain the origin of the lupines.

Hamlin replied,

At the end of the road lives a queer old bird who has so many hundreds of lupines on her land that she has acquired the habit of cultivating the seed when it opens.

The old schoolmarm said she’d like to shake her hand. “Shake,” said Hamlin. “I am Hilda Lupina.”

Yankee , in a subsequent edition, published an editor’s note: “Mrs. Hamlin was overwhelmed with hundreds of letters and almost as many visitors following publication of the original article in the June, 1971, Yankee; most of the correspondents and callers begged for sample seeds. Out of deference for Mrs. Hamlin’s advanced years, the editor feels called upon to remind would-be roadside gardeners that “Hilda Lupina” is not in competition with Burpee and other seed suppliers, and, happy as Hilda is with her fan mail, she is no longer up to distributing souvenir seeds of receiving and entertaining hordes of callers at Jupiter Knoll.”

Barbara Cooney

Barbara Cooney was an award-winning children’s book writer who lived in Damariscotta, Maine, about 20 miles from Christmas Cove. In 1982 she wrote and illustrated the book, Miss Rumphius, about a fictional woman named Alice Rumphius who lived a life of travel and adventure before retiring to her cottage. The story begins,

“Miss Rumphius, The Lupine Lady lives in a small house overlooking the sea. In between the rocks around her house grow blue and purple and rose-colored flowers. The Lupine Lady is little and old. But she has not always been that way.”

Miss Rumphius shared the 1983 National Book Award for Children’s Books. The National Education Association named the book one of its “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children” in 2007. Spellbound Productions made the book into an 18-minute film in 2000, and the Maine Library Association named its Lupine Award after Miss Rumphius.

Part of the book’s appeal lies in one of its last paragraphs, in which Miss Rumphius tells her niece: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”

Images: Miss Rumphius book cover By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2629786; Lupines By Theendofforever at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6755546. This story was updated in 2022.

15 comments 1.5k views

The Carnegie Libraries of New England

Three Carnegie libraries had their cornerstones laid in one day, but those were only a fraction of the tycoon-funded libraries in New England.

Andrew Carnegie donated $75,000 for the three building, all in Worcester, Mass. He then laid all three cornerstones in three hours on March 26, 1913.

Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library

The Worcester Daily Telegram reported on the ceremonies:

At all three branch libraries Mr. Carnegie made brief extemporaneous remarks, at all of them expressing keen pleasure because the city accepted his offer to build the libraries. He said that he is the city’s debtor, not the city his. He said the donors of the sites in the three locations and the city council in providing for the maintenance for these libraries, are the ones entitled to the greatest praise.

The day was cold and raw, and Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie were unprepared for it, having left New York with the sun shining. Mr. Carnegie found he required rubbers, and stopped off at a store in Quinsigamond to equip himself with them.

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant who made a fortune in steel, then gave away most of it. One of his favorite philanthropies was libraries. He doubled the number of libraries in the United States, giving away 1,681. Of those, 95 were in New England. All but three are still standing. Two, in South Worcester and Rockport, Mass., are now private homes. One was an Abercrombie & Fitch outlet in Freeport, Maine, until 2021..

Carnegie was born in Dumfermine, Scotland, on Nov. 25, 1835, and immigrated to the United States in 1848.

Before the Civil War, Carnegie worked as a telegraph messenger in Allegheny City, Pa. He then learned a man named Col. James Anderson opened his library of 400 volumes to working boys on Saturday afternoons.

He credited the library with steering him “clear of low fellowship and bad habits,” and opening “precious treasures of knowledge and imagination.”

Fortune smiled on Carnegie, but he didn’t smile much on his workers. In 1892, his managers cut wages and locked out workers at the Homestead, Pa., steel works for 143 days. A bloody conflict resulted and scabs replaced the workers. It didn’t help Carnegie’s reputation for benevolence.

He believed anyone who worked hard could succeed as he did. He also believed in giving to the “industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others.”

Puck magazine cartoon, 1903

Beginning in 1881, Carnegie spent 20 years giving away money. Much of it went to libraries.

Carnegie Libraries

At first, Carnegie only gave libraries to places where he had a personal connection. He started in 1880 in his hometown in Scotland. Allegheny City, Pa., was the first U.S. city to receive a Carnegie gift for a library.

Until 1898, Carnegie only commissioned the Fairfield, Iowa, library outside of southwestern Pennsylvania in America.

A typical Carnegie Library cost $50,000. Rarely was a request turned down. He refused to endow his libraries, because, as he said, “an endowed institution is liable to become the prey of a clique. The public ceases to take interest.”

Towns had to show they needed a library, provide the building site and pay to staff and maintain the library. Free service had to be provided to all who entered.

After he gave away his first five public libraries, Carnegie created an open shelf policy, which lowered operating costs and encouraged readers to browse. To discourage theft, the circulation desks were made larger than usual and placed near the front door.

The libraries were unique, designed in a variety of styles selected by the town. They were formal, small and simple. Each had a large, welcoming doorway almost always at the top of a staircase, to symbolize the patrons’ elevation by learning. Outside nearly all the libraries had lampposts or lanterns, symbolizing enlightenment.

Variety of Styles

Classical Revival Carnegie Library in South Worcester, Mass.

They were built in a variety of architectural styles, selected by the town. In New England those styles included Classical Revival, or its offshoot, ‘Carnegie Classical Revival,’ Beaux Arts, Colonial Revival, Italianate and Queen Anne.

Prairie Style Carnegie Library in Vinalhaven, Maine

One was built in the Prairie Style on a very non-prairie location: Vinalhaven Island in Maine. John Calvin Stevens, the designer of Maine, designed two, in Houlton and Rumford.

Between 1901 and 1917, Carnegie donated:

43 public libraries in Massachusetts from 35 grants totaling $1,137,500;
18 public libraries in Maine from 18 grants totaling $241,450;
11 public libraries in Connecticut from 8 grants totaling $191,900;
Nine public libraries in New Hampshire from nine grants totaling $134,000;
Four public libraries in Vermont from four grants of $80,000.

(Take a virtual tour of New England’s public Carnegie Libraries here.)

Rhode Island’s Carnegie Library

The John Hay Carnegie library at Brown University in Providence

Rhode Island has only one Carnegie Library, but it’s a big one: the John Hay Library at Brown University. Carnegie donated $150,000 for the library, half the cost, and asked that it bear Hay’s name. Hay graduated from Brown in 1858, became Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, U.S. Secretary of State and friend of the tycoon.

Carnegie’s academic libraries were larger and more elaborate than his spare, simple public libraries. The interior of the Williston Memorial Library at Mount Holyoke resembles Westminster Hall in England.

The Carnegie Library at Tufts.

In Massachusetts he also donated libraries to Tufts, Smith, Wellesley and Radcliffe. He gave a library to Norwich University in Vermont and the Hamilton Smith Library (now Hall) at the University of New Hampshire. And he donated Carnegie Hall at the University of Maine.

(Take a virtual tour of New England’s academic Carnegie Libraries here.)

Carnegie died Aug. 11, 1919, in Lenox, Mass., at his Shadow Brook estate, then reported to be the second largest private residence in the United States. By then he had given away 95 percent of his fortune.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Hay Library By Filetime – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93721309. Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24513387. Granby Public Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23974164. Unionville Carnegie Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Unionville, ConnecticutUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29970923.

5 comments 354 views

Amazing Grace Hopper, COBOL Inventor and Slayer of Dragons, Gremlins and Bugs

In 1946, the U.S. Navy considered Grace Hopper too old to be an officer. Thirty-seven years later, President Ronald Reagan promoted her to rear admiral because of her pioneering work in computers.

In 1986, she told David Letterman about meeting the president.

When I met him I tiptoed up to him and got up on my toes and said, ‘Sir, may I tell you something?’ And he looked at me funny as all get out, as if I was going to threaten something, and I said, “I’m older than you are.” He got out a laugh you could hear across the country.

But even in her 70s, Grace Hopper had a better grasp of how computers would change our lives than most younger people did.

She ushered in the computer revolution starting in World War II, developing crucial languages and programs and laying the foundation for the computer programming profession.

Ironically, she gets credit for something she did not do: Pull a moth out of an early computer and coin the expression “computer bug.”

Becoming Grace Hopper

She was born Grace Brewster Murray on Dec. 9, 1906, in New York City, the great-granddaughter of a Navy rear admiral and the daughter of a prosperous businessman and his wife. She grew up in privilege on the Upper West Side of New York, with private schools and summers spent on Lake Wentworth in Wolfeboro, N.H.

Her parents sent her to Vassar College, where a scientist named Maria Mitchell had been the first person appointed to the faculty. Grace graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1928 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. In 1930, she earned a master’s in mathematics from Yale, the first woman to do so. Four years later, she got her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale.

Grace Hopper Meets Mark I

She married another academic, Vincent Hopper, and taught math at Vassar. By 1940, bored with the classroom, she took a sabbatical to study at NYU with Richard Courant, an applied mathematician who had escaped Nazi Germany. They worked on partial differential equations, the mathematical foundation for aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, electrical engineering and quantum mechanics.

When the United States entered World War II, Grace Hopper’s husband, brother, cousins and many friends joined the military. She wanted to contribute, too. She wanted something more than her job, which didn’t challenge her, and her marriage, which had failed.

Grace divorced her husband, left her tenure-track professorship at Vassar and joined the Naval Reserves in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She had to get waivers because of her size (105 lbs.) and, at 38, two years too old. She graduated first in her class at boot camp – the U.S. Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

While she was in Northampton, a huge machine called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator had been shipped to Harvard from an IBM laboratory in Endicott, N.Y. Howard Aiken, now a lieutenant commander in the Navy, had come up with the idea for a mechanical arithmetic machine that could speed the hand calculations required for his thesis on the propagation of radio waves.

IBM had spent eight years and $250,000 for the thing, which measured 51 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 feet deep. Today, its computing power could be stored in a tiny corner of a microchip. Harvard operated it under a contract with the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships and named it the Mark I — the first computer in the U.S.

Harvard Hotbed

By 1944, it was becoming clear the war could be won by technical and scientific breakthroughs. Calculations were needed to create implosion devices for the atomic bomb. Engineering problems needed to be solved for the new aircraft and ship hulls being designed. Missiles were coming into use, and their trajectories needed to be calculated. New magnetic mines were set off by metal ships; the navy had to know how far the explosion would extend so they could figure out how close to each other they should be placed.

Until then, mathematical problems had been solved by teams of human beings. But the new machine was so much more powerful than anything else available then that it was used for many of the scientific developments of World War II, concluded Kathleen Williams in Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea.

On July 2, 1944, Lt. (j.g.) Grace Hopper was taken under armed guard to Harvard’s Cruft Physics Laboratory. “Where have you been?” asked her fearsome new boss, Howard Aiken. He barked at her to solve a mathematics equation on the machine she had never seen before.

She would spend the rest of the war with a small staff that worked around the clock under intense pressure. Sometimes she slept on her desk. Sometimes she didn’t sleep.

The projects were so secret, wrote Wheeler, “even the coders usually identified them only by letters of the alphabet.”

Hopper called what came to be the Harvard Computation Lab as “a hotbed of ideas and concepts and dreams.”

Debugging

The Mark I was noisy and often balked because something went wrong. Wire brushes inside the machine sometimes frayed and sparked; the researchers found out which ones were stopping the machine by borrowing Grace Hopper’s mirror from her Navy-issue handbag. She developed a nomenclature for the problems that plagued the machine:

A “dragon” chewed holes in the paper tape that fed instructions to the Mark I, and a set of “gremlins” picked up the small dots of paper that had been punched out of the tape and replaced them. She drew cartoons of imaginary bugs: a table worm, the NRL bug, the kitchie boo boo bug. She was irreverent to the point of insubordination, wrote Kurt Beyer in Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.

Aiken one day ordered her to write a manual for the Mark I. She replied she’d never written a book before. “You’re in the navy now,” he said. She came up with a 561-page manual for the machine.

When Aiken heard the machine go silent, he demanded to know why. The staff learned to assuage him by saying they were “debugging.”

End of the War and a Moth

Grace Hopper in 1960

When the war ended, Grace Hopper wanted to transfer to the regular Navy. But at 40 she was two years too old. She stayed at Harvard with Aiken and worked as a research fellow under contract with the Navy to develop more powerful computers: the Mark II and Mark III. The Mark II was five times faster than the Mark I; the Mark III was 50 times faster than the Mark II.

In the summer of 1947, the Mark II spit out incorrect results. The programmers discovered the cause of the malfunction: a moth. It was taken out of the computer with tweezers and taped into a page of the logbook. Someone wrote, “First actual bug found.”

Grace Hopper often gets credit for plucking the moth from the computer and coining the expression “computer bug.” Actually, usage of the term dates to Thomas Edison. But Grace Hopper popularized the term as she continued to develop computers.

In the late ‘40s, even IBM didn’t think there’d be much business use for computers. Grace Hopper did the unthinkable in 1949 and rejected a tenured professorship at Vassar to work on computers in the private sector.

“Life is too short to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again,” she once said.

COBOL

Back then, even IBM didn’t see much business use for computers.

Grace Hopper invented new programs and languages and technologies that allow computers to program themselves. She invented the computer language COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), once the most common language, just as its name says.

In 1967 she went to work as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy’s Office of Information Systems Planning. The Navy promoted her to captain in 1973. She urged the Defense Department to replace large mainframe-based computer systems with networks of small machines. She understand that someday people would be communicating desk-to-desk with their computers.

Grace Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966, then returned twice. All told, she spent 43.5 years in the Navy.

In 1983, the television program 60 Minutes interviewed her, calling her a member of the small band of brothers and sisters who ushered in the computer age. U.S. Rep. Phil Crane, an Illinois Republican, saw the show and introduced a bill to have her promoted to commodore. Ultimately she won a promotion to rear admiral, by presidential order.

Grace Hopper died Jan. 1, 1992. Today, 23 years after her death, the woman nicknamed “Amazing Grace” is the most numerically popular computer pioneer on the Web.

To see snippets from the Grace Hopper 60 Minutes interview, click here. To see the 1986 grace Hopper interview on David Letterman, click here. Photos courtesy National Archives. This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Grace Hopper at the Univac By Unknown (Smithsonian Institution) – Flickr: Grace Hopper and UNIVAC, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19763543.

5 comments 495 views

The French Chef Comes on With a Bang in 1963

Julia Child was neither French nor a chef, but The French Chef made her a national icon and helped launch the Public Broadcasting System.

The French Chef

When The French Chef first aired on Feb. 11, 1963, Julia Child, 50, had written a cookbook had had almost no television experience. The previous summer she had cooked an omelet on a hotplate for a WGBH-TV program called People Are Reading.

That appearance went so well that WGBH producers decided to air a pilot program. Julia cooked an omelet and, on the next show, soufflés. At the end of the second show she sat down and ate her soufflé with a slug of white wine – something that hadn’t been done before on American live television.

Her fondness for wine would become one of the many leitmotifs of Julia Child’s cooking shows, which for 62 years taught Americans to make mousses, quiches and crepes.

“Drama is very important in life,” she once said. “You have to come on with a bang.”

Plymouth Roots

Julia Child was the daughter of a wealthy Pasadena banker. She was educated at Smith College and served in the Office of Special Services during World War II. She met Paul Child in Ceylon, they married and lived in Europe, where Julia finally learned to cook at the age of 32. While living in Paris, she began writing her blockbuster cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Julia and Paul moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1961. Despite her California upbringing, Julia had deep roots in Massachusetts. Her maternal grandmother was a direct descendant of William Bradford. Her maternal grandfather, Byron Weston, also had roots in Plymouth Colony, served as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts . He started the Weston Paper Company, which rivaled the Crane Paper Company.

Paul and Julia Child watched that first pilot program on their black-and-white television in Cambridge, where their neighbors included Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Julia was horrified. She said she looked like Mrs. Steam Engine, careening across the screen, panting heavily. “There I was in black and white, a large woman sloshing eggs too quickly here, too slowly there, she said”

But she was real, she was easygoing and she didn’t talk down to her audience. She was also a character at 6’2” with a warbly voice and a wicked sense of humor. WGBH decided knew they had a hit.

The French Chef Premiers With a Shock

Julia Child

They produced the show in a demonstration kitchen at the Cambridge Electric Light Company. The stove, unfortunately, was electric. Every time Julia touched it, the stove gave her a mild shock. If she perspired heavily, the shock was not so mild. Careful viewers could see her twitch when a shock caught her by surprise.

Feb. 11, 1963, was the night of the Beanpot game between Harvard and Boston College. Fortunately for Julia, it didn’t start until 9 p.m. The French Chef debuted at 8 p.m.

Julia made beef bourguignon, ‘a perfectly delicious dish,’ she called it. She had written the script, bought the ingredients and brought kitchen equipment and props such as tablecloths, dishes, candlesticks and wine glasses. Volunteers were recruited to wash dishes.

Paul diagrammed the entire kitchen, down to the bottles on the shelves. When Julia had to reach for the olive oil, she could just glance at his notes that said, ‘shelf #1, left-hand side, glass bottle.’

Mishaps

The show went without a hitch. The second one, not so much. She was busily chatting with her audience through the camera when the onion soup burned. She didn’t acknowledge the mistake. “That’s a wonderful smell,” she said, as she inhaled the smoking mess.

Many mishaps followed. She burned the butter, dropped the food, spilled the sauce and wiped her fingers on her apron. An urban myth spread that she had once dropped a chicken on the floor, picked it up and dusted it off.

It never happened, though she once dropped a potato pancake onto the stove. “Oh, that didn’t go very well,” she said. “But you can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?”

She used kitchen utensils for comic effect, once throwing a rolling pin over her shoulder because she didn’t like it. She staunchly defended cream and butter, dismissing margarine as ‘that other spread.’ She scoffed at dieting, saying it was what you did while waiting for the steak to cook.

On an episode about cooking chicken, she introduced a row of raw poultry as the chicken sisters, slapping them as she called them by name: Miss Broiler, Miss Fryer, Miss Roaster, Miss Capon, Miss Stewer and old Madame Hen!’

Love At First Sight

The Julia Child kitchen

The public loved her. One viewer wrote to the station, “Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter.”

“Loved her looking for the cover of the casserole,” wrote another. They also sent contributions, mentioning Julia Child. Perhaps what got her the show was her moneyed Cambridge neighbors, who served her dishes at parties and talked about how funny and entertaining she was.

Her timing was good, too. French cooking had been considered expensive restaurant fare. But America had entered a new phase of prosperity and American cooks were ready to leave behind molded Jell-O salads and tuna casseroles. The immensely popular First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, had hired a real French chef, Rene Verdon, to cook for the White House.

The French Chef made Julia Child famous. “Celebrity has its uses,” she said. “I can always get a seat in any restaurant.”

The French Chef Syndicated

WGBH was a shoestring operation at the time, a station that evolved from the 19^th-century Lowell Lecture Series. Sometimes The French Chef had to cover expenses by auctioning off the dishes to the audience at the end of the show.

But The French Chef was so popular it quickly syndicated to 20 other educational stations across the country at a time when all educational programming was local.

It became the backbone of the fledgling educational television network we now know as PBS.

In 1964, The French Chef received a Peabody Award. Julia was credited with doing “more than show us how good cooking is achieved; by her delightful demonstrations she has brought the pleasures of good living into many American homes.” On Nov. 25, 1966, Julia Child appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “Our Lady of the Ladle.”

Today, Julia Child’s kitchen, used to stage subsequent cooking programs, can be visited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

PBS has a website devoted to her, which includes her advice:

This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun.

With thanks to Dearie, The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz.

Photos: The Julia Child Kitchen,’ by Matthew Bisanz. ” Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0–2.5–2.0–1.0 via Wikimedia Commons. ‘Julia Child at KUHT,’ by KUHT. Licensed under Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication via Wikimedia Commons. Julia Child Kitchen frontal view By ‘Matthew G. Bisanz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7977521.

This story about The French Chef was updated in 2022.

6 comments 1.3k views

Newer Posts

Older Posts