BETTY: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I

by Anne Wellman

  Don

  Sometime during the late 1930s or early ‘40s Betty met, or perhaps re-met, the slightly younger and darkly handsome Donald Chauncey MacDonald. Blanche described him as tall and round-faced with dark, close-cropped curls. With a name like that, Don was naturally of Scottish extraction – both parents were MacDonalds and his paternal grandfather had been born in Scotland. He was born in 1910 or 1911 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, one of twelve children his father had sired by two wives; Don was among the second brood produced by his mother Beulah, who was much younger than his father. By the age of nine his family had moved to Douglas, Nebraska, and later ended up in Seattle. In Onions in the Stew, her book about this period in her life, Betty wrote that Don came from a Free Methodist family and by his own account had had a pretty austere upbringing involving hauling ashes to earn money for school clothes and enduring hours of praying in church on bony knees. Even allowing for Betty’s usual comic exaggeration, Don probably did have a hard childhood. His father Clinton worked as a carpenter when in Nebraska and later as a gardener, providing for his large family on whatever he was able to earn by this hard manual work.

  Don and Betty’s lives had followed remarkably similar paths. Just as in Betty’s childhood, Don’s family had moved around during his early years. Like Betty, he attended both Roosevelt High School and the University of Washington, where he studied Economics and Business. He worked in the burglar alarm industry before starting at the university in his late twenties and, again like Betty, he did not graduate from Washington and only attended for the year 1938-39. In 1940 at the age of twenty-nine he was still living with his family at home, just as Betty had done for so many years, and was again employed in the burglar alarm business. Don was portrayed by Betty, affectionately, as somewhat taciturn and given to quoting grim Scots poetry at every setback. He was certainly averse to frivolous chat – Blanche described Don excusing himself to go and get a cup of coffee, or returning to his car, whenever she and Betty met by chance and were exchanging their usual stories.

  Betty’s marriage to her ‘dour Scotsman’, as she called him, probably took place in April 1942. Both were in their early thirties. It seems likely that Don ultimately adopted Anne and Joan as both took the surname MacDonald (the girls thought Don was ‘very handsome’, Blanche related.) Don was by then a defense worker engaged on final test work at Boeing’s Renton plant in Seattle. In August that year the Seattle Times reported that Boeing electrician Donald C. MacDonald had been denied new tires to which he was entitled as a defense worker because of ‘abuse of rubber’ through speeding; the rationing board decreed that he could not buy new tires until the war was over. This boy racer may or may not have been Betty’s Don.

  Betty was not the only Bard sister to marry that year. Alison tied the knot in June with musician and composer Frank Sugia. Theirs was a classic white wedding complete with white satin and lace dress, Anne as one of the bridesmaids and Mary’s two little daughters as flower girls. Dede, aged twenty-eight, followed suit in 1943 with Navy man Melvin Goldsmith. All the Bard sisters were now married.

  Mike Gordon was still sending his extravagant gifts to Betty and the family and in her subsequent article about Mike for Reader’s Digest Betty wrote that she thought, with relief, that with her marriage to Don the torrent of gifts would at last cease. On the contrary, the article went on, Mike and Don met and formed a mutual admiration society. Don thought Mike was amazing, funny and sweet. Mike dubbed Don a handsome fellow and a ‘Scotchman just like me’. The presents continued but in a new, masculine form. Little motors, fifty gallons of anti-freeze and cases of whiskey arrived along with the usual mounds of seasonal fruit for the children. Mike appeared to be courting Don as well as Betty, and Don then had to join Betty in the business of trying to find gifts for Mike that weren’t immediately topped by something several times as expensive coming straight back. It was a problem that couldn’t be solved, Betty wrote – until much later when she produced the best-selling The Egg and I and herself became ‘wealty and prrrominent’. This became the ultimate payback. Mike carried around dozens of copies of the book in his car and tossed them to all his friends, telling them it was the biggest thing since the Bible. He died in 1948, and Betty attended the lavish funeral to pay her respects – unusually for her as she disapproved of funerals.

  The Depression was over, and with the US now in the war the federal government needed planes and ships. The State of Washington could build both. Roosevelt’s public works projects to create employment during the 1930s had included the building of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia river, and this along with other Columbia River dams could power the shipyards of Vancouver and Puget Sound. The same cheap energy also made Seattle into one of the nation’s aircraft capitals, as electricity-powered aluminum plants were able to supply Boeing with the material needed to build America’s bomber squadrons. By the end of 1942, 150,000 workers were laboring around the clock in the state’s shipyards and aircraft factories – including the first ever ‘girl welders’ at Boeing. After the bitter times of the previous decade Washington State was succeeding at a new economy, one which only federal investment during the Depression had made possible. But with this burgeoning wartime growth workers had flooded in to Seattle and there was little accommodation to be had. As a new family Betty and Don, plus Anne and Joan, needed to find somewhere of their own. Up until her remarriage Betty was still living at home, in the same brown shingled house, with the girls, her mother, one sister and honorary sister Madge. In Onions in the Stew, Don is living in a dark apartment just off the campus of the University of Washington and when his room-mate moves out, Don and Betty spend their weekend honeymoon (all that was allowed defense workers) right there in the apartment. Betty then moves in, with the girls for the moment remaining at Sydney’s.

  A notice of eviction arrives from the landlord giving them about one week to leave. For a brief period they live in the apartment above, but the noise in the neighborhood in the warmer months means that shift-worker Don can get no sleep. Betty starts to look for a house but in Seattle there are no houses for rent and none for sale for the kind of money Betty and Don have, which is pretty much nothing. Looking further afield, and after extensive searches on nearby Bainbridge and Whidbey islands, they finally track down the perfect place on Vashon, a 15-mile-long island just across from Seattle in Puget Sound and accessible only by ferry-boat. The owners keep changing their minds about selling but after a summer of vacillation the move finally takes place in October 1942.

  By now Betty’s honorary sister Madge was also married, the last to go, and the old house on 15th Avenue was sold. Mary’s husband Clyde was overseas in the Navy and Sydney moved in with Mary in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood. Later Sydney was to live more or less with Betty on the island; they got on well and were good friends.

  Vashon

  Beautiful Vashon is superbly described in Onions: the lushness, the spectacular views of Mount Rainier, the frequent harshness of a life cut off from the mainland. In 1942 when Betty and Don arrived the population was still in the low 3,000s. Today, the population is well over ten thousand but the lack of a bridge from the mainland has meant that Vashon still retains the rustic character and sense of isolation that Betty knew. It’s home to many artists, writers, musicians and organic farmers. The orchards and strawberry farms of Betty’s time no longer play a major role in the island’s economy but Vashon continues to hold its annual strawberry festival, and is now called Vashon-Maury Island because of the isthmus connecting it with the neighboring island of that name.

  The year the MacDonalds arrived the island was much affected, as everywhere else in the country, by the continuing war. Air raid observation posts staffed by volunteers had been set up and air raid drills were being held; there was training in the High School on medical care and how to black out the home; there were scrap iron and copper drives. Tires, fuel, and coffee were all rationed. On 16 May the order had been issued for the evacuation of the island’s J
apanese American residents and 126 had been taken away, despite the fact that other of Vashon’s Japanese Americans had already volunteered to defend their country and were serving in US forces. Vashon had to prepare itself for possible invasion by Japan, and at the time the US authorities viewed all Japanese American people as potential fifth columnists. The population of the island had been decimated in other ways. Many had left to work at Boeing, including even some teachers and school principals, because there was more money to be earned there. In June of 1942 strawberry pickers were in short supply because many of the usual workers were in defense jobs or the military; efforts were made to attract Native American pickers in their stead.

  Betty and Don’s new place on the island was literally a house on the beach, a hand-built cabin on seven acres located about a quarter of a mile south of Dolphin Point on the east side of the island. The walls of the house were built of hewn fir, the roof was made of hand-split cedar shakes (shingles made from split logs) and the rain and salt air had turned it all a soft silvery gray. Yellow pots of red geraniums stood on the window-sills in the cheerful kitchen, which was separated from the large living-room by a dining area. From the living room a few steps led up to a little balcony onto which opened three bedrooms and a bathroom; the thin, highly polished log railings running along the balcony and the hand-hewn rafters on the high ceiling gave the house an old-fashioned rustic air.

  But although charming, the house was built originally as a summer home and during the colder months was freezing. The cavernous granite fireplace demanded mountains of wood and when Betty first started to write books she often had to type in the cold, wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off. Blanche said it was a dramatic place, very beachy-looking, but that she was never quite warm enough when she visited.

  The only way to get to the house was by the mile-and-a-half walking trail from the ferry or by landing a boat on the beach. In Onions in the Stew, kindly new neighbors allow them to use their road to get part-way to the beach and also give them the use of some boats. Don and a friend helping with the move tie the boats together and load up everything they have, including the washing machine, to bring in by water. This really was how they moved in, according to an interview Anne and Joan gave many years later.

  The girls were soon enrolled at local schools on the island, Joan in seventh grade at the Vashon grade school, Anne as freshman in Vashon High School. For Betty and Don, everyday life was now complicated not only by war conditions on the island but also by the necessary commute by ferry to the mainland for their jobs. In Onions Betty is allowed to take shortened lunch-hours so she can arrive a little later in the morning, at eight instead of wartime seven-thirty. Don has finished his night shifts but has to be at Boeing’s Renton plant by six-thirty in the morning, and so catches the five-fifteen ferry. Each morning they get up at four-thirty (a painful reminder to Betty of other early starts as the wife of a chicken farmer), warm up the kitchen by turning the oven on, and eat the breakfast Betty has laid out the night before. Then Don shoots out of the door into the rain and darkness, allowing himself sixteen minutes to run up the beach (if the tide’s out), start the car, and drive the mile and a half to the ferry.

  At five-thirty Betty gets the girls’ breakfast and then takes a shower in the cold, dark little service-room downstairs, having first checked for slugs and spiders. After waking the girls at six-thirty and refereeing their quarrels, Betty then has to leave them to get themselves to school while she sets off before seven to catch the seven-twenty ferry. She wears sensible shoes and socks over her silk stockings, carries her office shoes, and usually has to run the last quarter mile of the trail to the dock to get there in time for the ferry. The trail stretched from the house to the dock along the steep southeast face of the island about fifty feet above the shore; in the spring and summer it was overgrown with nettles and in the fall it was slippery and cobwebby. Occasionally, after a storm, the trail might slide off the hill altogether and Betty would have to pick her uncertain way across the face of a seeping bank. At a certain point she can see whether the ferry is coming in, is in already, or is going out again, and she starts running accordingly. By the time she gets to work she’s boiling hot and then has to sit for the rest of the day in an office which is heated to 80 degrees, filled with smoke, and has the windows firmly shut. That her only recently healed lungs could cope with this regime is hard to believe.

  Vashon was a beautiful place to live but conditions could be harsh. The elements were hardly kind: rain, heat, cold, earthquakes, snow, mountain slides, storms, fog and wind could all be extreme. In Onions getting wood for the fire dominates their existence whatever the weather. The fireplace in the living-room is enormous and can accommodate several huge logs. At first going for wood seems like fun – all they have to do is go down to the beach and pick up bark brought by the tide, or go up to the woods behind the house and roll it down. There is fir and alder and cedar and to start with, in the fall, they keep huge fires burning from early morning till late at night. Then the days begin getting shorter, the bark tides fewer and the days wetter and colder. There is considerably less enthusiasm about fetching wood and the family take to wearing extra clothing and letting the animals sleep on the couches and chairs to keep them warm. It was like living in a mine, Betty wrote: dark and damp and cold the whole day, whether getting up or going to bed.

  On the other hand, the island offered abundant sources of food to make up for wartime shortages. The MacDonalds’ own private beach offered clams, geoducks, sea cucumbers, squid, crabs, piddocks, cockles and mussels. By going out in the rowing boat they could catch sole, salmon, cod, Spanish mackerel, red snapper and perch. Other edibles available on their property were blackberries, huckleberries, watercress, and mushrooms, although Betty was wary about the mushrooms after suffering an episode of poisoning. Vegetation on the island grew madly and a neighbor in later years remembered Don driving down their shared road with the car door open, machete in hand as he hacked back the weeds.

  Reading between the lines of Onions in the Stew, Betty was now really enjoying life after so many bad experiences; the past was behind her. Her marriage was happy, and, in Onions at least, the girls had readily accepted Don as their stepfather. She and Don were only in their early thirties, finally had just enough money and were living in a very picturesque spot, even if it was mostly freezing and they were often at the mercy of the elements. In the book Betty writes happily about the joys of digging clams on their own beach; the riotous growth of anything and everything they plant in the garden; their hardy and sometimes eccentric island neighbors; the raccoons who come right up the house to eat the family’s leftovers and the candy Betty buys just for them; and the constant stream of guests in the summer, usually Mary accompanied by several friends. While her husband was away on war service Mary wasn’t sitting around: she was engaged in many worthwhile causes and did plenty of entertaining, which tended to include Betty’s lovely place on Vashon, not always with much notice. On one occasion, according to Blanche, she arrived with several guests in tow only to be greeted by an unpleasant odor: the septic tank was backed up. Mary simply declared that it was the ultimate in hospitality for a hostess to clean out the septic tanks for her guests, and sailed on in.

  There’s a whole chapter on the family’s cats and dogs that Betty loved so much; she could never quite like anyone who didn’t like dogs, she once wrote. There’s a chapter on food which is mostly about other people’s bad cooking and includes plenty of caustic comments on the type of revolting lima bean, jelly and macaroni casserole ‘so dear to the heart of the bum cook’. Loving children and animals and cooking good food were at the heart of Betty’s love of home; she was always happiest on the domestic scene. She still loved to paint, and would turn out tempera landscapes and pastels of the children. Despite her successful career in government service, and later her worldwide fame as a writer, she often talked about wanting to stay home and do homey things like painting porch furniture rather than
go out to work. ‘I am first, last and always a wife and mother,’ she once firmly declared.

  There was, of course, the occasional fly in the ointment. In Onions ‘Lesley Arnold’ is a glamorous woman living on Vashon who appears to be making a dead set at Don:

  Lesley Arnold’s voice was husky to that fascinating point just short of asthma...so beautiful she made me slightly sick at my stomach...She made me feel just like a hygiene teacher. A hot hygiene teacher in an ugly tan knitted suit, the wrong shoes and no husband. Don, my honest, blunt Scotsman, was so dashing (drooling?) that even the girls were impressed.

  ‘Lesley’, whose Navy husband was mostly absent, keeps inveigling Don into her house with spurious jobs that require a man. Don likes Lesley and the girls adore her and they all make Betty feel like a pariah if she ventures even the slightest criticism.

  This glamorous rival for Don’s affections was based in reality. One evening Blanche, who had also ended up living on the island, was at the MacDonalds’ for dinner. It got later and later and still Don hadn’t arrived home; Betty knew where he was, and started to become upset. Sydney was present too and Betty asked her mother whether she should call the woman’s house, but Sydney advised against it. She told Betty to go and tidy herself up, put on fresh clothes and comb her hair. ‘Lesley’ was no doubt looking very alluring and turning on the charm, she said, and if Don came home and found Betty tired, mad, and sarcastic, the contrast would not be in her favor. Betty followed this advice and when Don finally strolled up the path she was very cheerful, looked lovely and did not mention how late he was. That evening she served up a succulent beef roast in pastry, fluffy mashed potatoes with gravy, and a side salad of avocado and grapefruit. The Bards were never ones for sweet things, and dessert was just grapes and an assortment of cheeses. She received compliments from Don, and in Blanche’s eyes won the contest with ‘Lesley’ hands down. In Onions in the Stew this rival eventually moves away, and Betty wrote that she and Don were both relieved. (There was another potential rival mentioned in Onions in the Stew with whom Don on one occasion shares a blanket on board the deck of a yacht. Don may or may not have had a roving eye, but Betty always maintained that they were very happily married.)