Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  On June 25, 1920, a rainy Friday in an extraordinarily rainy month, Alison Cleveland Bard was born in the family home. She shared a middle name with her older brother, Sidney. Her birth and Darsie’s death left Cleve as the lone male in a family of women. Besides her mother, Alison had Mary, Betty, and Gammy to rear her.

  In autumn 1920, Sydney learned of a possible source of income for the family: an undeveloped mineral property, a potential source of gypsum, in Lewiston, Montana. Darsie had co-owned the property with Raymond Calkins, a longtime friend who had risen through the ranks of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railway, becoming president of the line in 1919. Calkins told Sydney that he thought that if the property were developed, it could support Sydney and her children. Sydney asked him to handle the transactions for her, so Calkins found a tenant who was interested in leasing the property and developing the gypsum mine.21 Their agreement stipulated that the lessee would pay royalties to Calkins, Sydney, and Sydney’s children of not less than two thousand dollars twice yearly, plus an advance royalty of four thousand dollars, due by March 1921.

  There was one hitch: the developer was unwilling to enter into an agreement with minor children. To circumvent this difficulty, Calkins told Sydney he would set up a corporation that would lease the property on behalf of the owners. Calkins then organized the Northwest Gypsum Products Company, sold his own mining rights to the new corporation for ten thousand dollars, and proceeded under that company’s name to mine gypsum.

  Meanwhile, Darsie’s Montana estate, consisting solely of the gypsum property, went through probate, and Lewiston National Bank sold the Bards’ portion of the property to Calkins for its appraised value of $1,800. Thereafter, Calkins held title to the entire property. Sydney received an initial payment and was at first content with the transaction. It was only years later, when she learned that Calkins was profiting heartily from the mine, that she smelled a rat. She had sold the land, she realized, but not the mineral rights. There was also the question of whether that land had been fairly appraised. The murky financial deal with Calkins was a warning that the Bards’ fiscal security blanket was starting to fray.

  With Darsie’s death, his daughters lost their foothold in Seattle’s junior elite: Betsy and Mary Bard disappear from the St. Nicholas School roster after the spring of 1920. Eliminating school fees was an obvious economy. Autumn found the sisters—Betsy a freshman, Mary a junior, both still wearing their St. Nicholas uniforms—enrolled at the public Lincoln High School, a large, Jacobean-style brick building in Seattle’s bungalow-filled Wallingford neighborhood. The following year, studious Betsy was secretary of the sophomore class. Gregarious Mary appeared in the senior play and in the school’s opera, sang in the Glee Club, and chaired the Football Dance and the Girls’ Club social committee.

  Despite increasingly shaky finances, the Bards maintained the same happy, open household as they had before Darsie’s death. Margaret Bundy Callahan remembered, “At Lincoln High they made many new friends instantly and the Laurelhurst house was more full than ever of young people. Sunday evening open house at the Bards became an institution: phonograph music, the creaking of a hammock on summer evenings, the shuffle of dancing feet, lake-bathing and beach fire parties, waffles and hot chocolate and always the sound of young laughter. Sydney, or simply ‘Syd,’ became a trusted second mother to her children’s friends, the repository of innumerable youthful confidences.”22

  Among the Bard sisters’ new friends was Blanche Hamilton, a tiny girl who captivated Betsy with her ability to tell stories. She would become a lifelong friend. The youngest daughter of a mother who valued reading above almost anything, Blanche lived in a modest home in the Green Lake neighborhood. When Betsy invited Blanche home to meet her family, Blanche was awed at the prospect of visiting Laurelhurst.

  Blanche recalled her first impression of visiting Betsy’s home and meeting her mother: “As we entered the front door, Betsy’s mother, Mrs. Bard—or Sydney, as she asked both young and old to call her—met us. She was tall and thin, with patrician features, smartly plain in dress, and extremely warm and charming.”23 Sydney is present—in Blanche’s recollections as in Margaret’s—more as a friend than as a mother. Blanche joined the midnight waffle and cocoa parties that followed nighttime skinny-dipping sessions in icy Lake Washington. She remembered her first encounter with Betsy’s little sisters, “dressed in long white nighties with their little pink toes peeking out from under the bottom ruffle. Dede . . . was about five years old and had round, shiny gray eyes and dark brown hair. I wanted to reach over and pat her smooth ivory skin. . . . Alty [Alison], a little over two years old, had reddish hair, gorgeous amber-colored eyes, and the same lovely satin skin as Dede’s.”24 The girlhood Blanche Hamilton describes sharing with Betsy sounds carefree. Blanche remembered that Betsy and Mary, in stark contrast with most of their peers, were completely unafraid of teachers, the school principal, and other authority figures. This egalitarian attitude seems likely to have stemmed from Sydney’s anti-authoritarian approach to childrearing.

  Despite the outward suggestions that the Bards continued to lead a carefree, happy existence, Darsie’s death had left a void that Sydney would not or could not fill. Margaret Bundy Callahan is an important source on the Bards’ family life during this period. She grew close enough to the family to learn that Mary had always had tantrums, and that Darsie had disciplined her, handled her temper, and tried to rein her in. Sydney, in contrast, wanted her children and their friends to like her. She smoked and drank with her teenage children, for example, rather than setting limits or forbidding these activities. The Bard children, who had called Sydney “Mother” prior to their father’s death, now called her by her name. This change was indicative of a loosening of family discipline.

  Mary had her own ideas and more self-confidence than was sometimes prudent, and she took advantage of her mother’s leniency to exercise her independence. During the years immediately following her father’s death, Mary apparently realized that she could now set her course, and her family’s course, with little opposition. Sydney offered opinions but not rules. Life at the Bards’ lacked structure, perhaps almost as if no adult were present, so welcoming and eager was Sydney for the friendship of her children and their friends. “Everybody in this house does just as he pleases,” Betty credited Gammy as saying, and that statement seems to have been largely true.25

  Mary’s interests during these years tended less toward Seattle’s high society and more toward intellectual and cultural pursuits. “I have often wondered whether Mary would not have broken away, anyhow, had her father remained alive,” Margaret Bundy Callahan reflected. “There was a wayward streak in her nature that would probably have carried her off the beaten track, regardless of the fetters of circumstance.”26

  Margaret noted both the pleasant and the unpleasant sides of Mary, whose well-intentioned bossiness Betty would later credit with her own success. Margaret reflected, “Mary is surely a paradox if ever there was one. She is fundamentally so honest, yet with so much deception streaking her nature; at once so conventional and so scoffing at convention; so onto the imbecilities of the social world and so duped by them; so warm and giving in her responses to other human beings about her, yet at times so coldly selfish and cruel.”27 One of Mary’s notable qualities was her refusal to back down. If she decided someone should do something, she pushed and pestered until she prevailed.

  Mary graduated from high school in 1922. Her photograph in the Lincoln Totem yearbook shows a vivacious young woman. Her motto reads, “Torchy is the girl who put the pep in ‘pepper’!”28 That fall, Mary matriculated at the University of Washington, pledging the Alpha Phi sorority. As active in college as she’d been in high school, Mary served on the YWCA executive council and on the class social committee. In the four quarters she completed, she took courses in music, English, French, public speaking, and business administration.

  The University of Washington was even closer to the Bar
ds’ Laurelhurst home than Lincoln High School. The university had moved from its original location in downtown Seattle to what was then freshly logged land between Lakes Washington and Union in 1895. The southern portion of the campus was developed with both permanent and temporary structures created for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Many of the exposition buildings were used for classes during Mary’s time on campus.29

  In the fall of 1922, Betsy was assigned to attend the new Roosevelt High School, named for President Theodore Roosevelt, in northeast Seattle. Seattleites dubbed the building the “million-dollar school.” It boasted a 1,500-seat auditorium with a stage that was at the time one of the largest on the West Coast, separate gymnasiums for boys and girls, and modern brick and reinforced-concrete construction. Black walnut trees transplanted from Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay estate in New York graced the school’s front lawn.

  Betsy and Blanche Hamilton (who lived only a few blocks from the new school) entered as juniors. Betsy sang in the Glee Club and served on the school’s Improvement and Good Cheer committees. She was a member of the Honor Society. Her aspiration, according to Roosevelt’s Strenuous Life yearbook: “To be an illustrator.”30

  Betsy and Blanche graduated from Roosevelt in 1924, as members of the school’s second graduating class. Following Mary’s footsteps, Betsy matriculated at the University of Washington, eschewing her soft childhood nickname for the brisker name of Betty, which she thought sounded more sophisticated. Betty took mainly design and drawing courses, along with English, Spanish, and physical education. Like Mary, she pledged Alpha Phi. Betty completed three quarters: fall 1924 and winter and fall 1925.

  Betty did not know how to drive. Mary used the family car, an old Franklin, to ferry family and friends between Laurelhurst and the University District. She was nearsighted and a poor driver, Margaret Bundy Callahan observed, and while behind the wheel she was uncharacteristically silent as she concentrated on keeping the Franklin on the road.

  At home, money was going out, but little was coming in. Widows in Butte (who were numerous because of frequent mine accidents) often took in paying boarders after their husbands died, but in Seattle, Sydney didn’t. The family could also have moved to a more modest home in a less expensive part of town, but with all five of her children still at home, plus Gammy, Sydney perhaps felt she needed a house with some space. The Bards cut back in some ways, but Blanche Hamilton and Margaret Bundy Callahan report a font of delicacies, including items delivered from Seattle’s most exclusive food store, Augustine and Kyer. Sydney apparently refused to economize on food for her children and their hordes of friends.

  What Sydney did try as a means of bringing in money was operating a tearoom in the University District. It might have been her idea, but more likely it was Mary’s. Tearooms were popular in the late 1910s and 1920s, providing places where respectable women could dine alone or with other women, and running a tearoom was considered a genteel female enterprise. The city already boasted several popular establishments downtown. Moreover, Sydney had some experience to draw on: she, Mary, and Betty had all volunteered in the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital Tearoom, one of the hospital’s fund-raising enterprises. For an inveterate hostess and marvelous cook like Sydney Bard, the tearoom venture must have seemed like a pretty good bet.

  Sydney called her shop the Mandarin. All the Bards pitched in to help run it. Betty waited tables or minded Alison and Dede, Mary was the hostess, and Sydney cooked. Home-cooked food was de rigueur in tearooms, with an emphasis on delicate, ladylike dishes such as finger sandwiches, crab salad with cheese crackers, toasted cheese, waffles, chicken salad, deep-dish apple pie, and warm gingerbread.

  The Mandarin received frequent mention in the Gossip of the Shops column of the Seattle Times, written by “Jean”—who may have been a family friend. Jean effused, “With its dear little tables all painted a cool, cool green, and bright splashes of lacquer red about the cozy room, it is quite the most delightful place I’ve seen in a long time. And the food is wonderful! You all know Mrs. Darsie Bard, of course. Luncheon, tea, and dinner.”31 In winter, Jean raved about the Mandarin’s blazing fireplace and “homey” atmosphere. In summer, she advised her readers, “The special ice tea Mrs. Bard makes is the best in the city and her salads and sandwiches—yum! Yum! The delicious evening dinners are drawing more and more University District folk to The Mandarin!”32

  But this assessment was overly optimistic. Part of the tearoom’s problem may have been its multiple changes of location. The first location, 4515 15th Avenue Northeast, was on the ground floor of a small apartment building.33 This was slightly off the University District’s main thoroughfare, although it was on the Cowen Park–University District streetcar route. After less than a year, the Mandarin moved to 4530 University Way Northeast, more central to off-campus student activities. The building had been the University Way Club and was also at some point used as the Beta fraternity house.34 This location, too, Jean found homey: “One you can lounge around in, or play the piano.”35

  Less than a year later, the Mandarin moved to 4311 15th Avenue Northeast, where it occupied the ground floor of an aging rooming house.36 This, Jean told her readers, was “its permanent location—a spacious, homelike place, so comfortable and somehow just like we’ve read about in story books. Everyone who enjoys Mrs. Bard’s home cooking gathers there, from school children to grown-ups.”37

  They may have gathered, but they didn’t pay. Blanche Hamilton summed it up: Sydney “was no business woman as she had too much heart. Her friends and those of her children would go in to eat, and when they tried to pay the check, Sydney was apt to say, ‘Oh, Joe, let’s make this one on me.’ She had been the hospitable hostess in her own home too long. She could not make the transition, and the tearoom did not pay.”38

  The Bards’ Mandarin adventure ended poorly. The University Provision Company, a meat market that supplied The Mandarin, filed a complaint against Sydney in King County Superior Court demanding past-due payment.39 They filed a writ of attachment on Sydney’s car—the 1917 Franklin Touring automobile—which the King County sheriff impounded. In January 1925, Sydney settled the bill by signing the car over to University Provision, and the action was dismissed.

  In this crisis, as in most other matters on which family members or friends noted their impressions, Sydney appeared unflappable. Maybe the worst possible thing had already happened to her: losing her husband. Blanche Hamilton recalled hearing that after Darsie died, Sydney collapsed completely. “You have to get up, Sydney, you have to!” Mary had pleaded with her mother. Perhaps, having endured that loss, Sydney Bard figured nothing in the world could ever take her that far down again.

  Her financial difficulties, however, would persist. From 1924 onward, the public record shows a trail of Sydney’s real-estate troubles. King County and Jefferson County property transfer records, the many deeds, mortgages, and quit-claims bearing Sydney’s name, and the civil case files tell a sorry story.40

  When Darsie died, the Bards owned the Laurelhurst property free and clear. This property’s legal description—which matters here because of Sydney’s subsequent actions—was The Palisades Addition to the City of Seattle, block 4, lots 1–4. Lot 3, on which the house stood, was the most valuable. Sydney mortgaged lots 3 and 4 to the State Savings and Loan Corporation. Her monthly mortgage payments were set at forty-eight dollars. Sydney traded her equity for cash and then, as court documents later stated, “utterly failed” to make any mortgage payments. This established a pattern, a real-estate shell game of mortgage and remortgage that Sydney would continue for the next two decades, no matter where she and her family lived.

  Sydney’s actions indicate that she was suggestible, especially to the ideas of her children. If the tearoom was Mary’s idea, now it was Cleve’s turn. “On a drive to the Olympic Peninsula, the Bard family was attracted to a picturesque farm,” Blanche Hamilton remembered. “Although Betty’s younger brother, Cleve, was only seventeen a
nd had no farming experience, he thought farm life would be wonderful. Practicality was swallowed up in romanticism. They bought the farm.”41

  “She’s not like a mother a bit,” Margaret Bundy Callahan remembered Mary’s telling her about Sydney.42 Nothing demonstrates Sydney’s lack of maternal wisdom quite as much as her decision to purchase a large dairy farm in Jefferson County for her completely inexperienced teenage son to run. What was she thinking?

  Maybe Sydney believed the family had exhausted the promise of Seattle. She was teetering on the brink of insolvency, and the Mandarin enterprise—even if spun to their friends as madcap fun—had been a failure. Funds for Betty’s and Mary’s college tuition had dwindled. And Cleve, the only son of a Harvard man, refused to attend high school. His Roosevelt High School attendance record shows a string of poor marks, followed by the harsh rubber stamp “On Probation” and—as of spring 1925—“Dropped for Scholarship.” Cleve, more than anyone, needed a fresh start.

  And things might have worked out: Cleve might have shaped himself into a dairyman if only Sydney—who, in her defense, had never handled a property purchase on her own—had thought to investigate the farm’s chain of title.