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

by Paula Becker

  The Bards, their friends, and the city hunkered down. Money was tight, but some restaurants offered meals worth the pinched pennies. Margaret Bundy Callahan wrote the “Around the Town” column for the weekly Town Crier, including restaurant suggestions:

  The Open Kitchen at the Public Market: A hole in the wall jernt [joint], and absolutely the cheapest in town. Dinners, believe it or not, for 15-cents—steak. Good cooking. . . . Mannings (All over town, but preferable in the Pike Place Market): Small cafeteria counter, good food and couldn’t be cheaper. Sandwiches and salads for 5-cents upstairs in the Pike Place Market. If you get there a little off the noon hour early or late, you can get a table by the window and look out over the waterfront, with no extra charge for the swell view.7

  The Bards were in solidarity with many fellow Seattleites who were trying to spark fun and comfort without much financial flint.

  Regardless of their economic standing, the Bards retained qualities that attracted artistic, unusual, intellectual people. They were intelligent and well-read but never took themselves too seriously. They punctured signs of boastfulness in one another and in anyone else.

  The Bards battled their poverty by ignoring it. They were cash-poor but rich in wit and in each other. And they were proud. “Mary still had the makings of a snob, as did all the Bard women,” Margaret Bundy Callahan recalled.

  Not the usual type of snob at all, but a peculiar type all their own. Social position and wealth meant nothing to the Bards, except in the most naïve, make-believe sort of way. Theirs was a snobbery based on personal attraction, and they were merciless towards those they regarded as uninteresting. This I believe was a hang-over from when Mr. Bard was alive. Before he died their lives may have been governed very largely by conventional class distinction—they spoke at times with an amusing wistful note in their voices of parties at the D. Whitney Huntingtons. Of course, after Mr. Bard’s death there wasn’t any money to keep up such associations, so they turned with insouciance that was to mark their attitude towards every change in their fates, to what illusions they could afford.8

  A family member recalled Sydney’s cooking in the fireplace when the electricity had been cut off because of unpaid bills and noted that the Bards’ joie de vivre was undimmed. The Bard sisters seemed to be channeling wisecracking heroines of screwball comedies: Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn. They were witty, sarcastic, and droll, navigating briskly through difficulties, as if directed by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges. Blanche Hamilton said the Bard house had a You Can’t Take It with You feel, and that Sydney was akin to Penny Sycamore, the mother in that 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. “Sydney was usually sitting in the corner of the sofa with a book in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a coffee cup on the table, and a couple of dogs at her feet,” Blanche recalled. “She made me feel as though she had been sitting there just waiting for me to come and visit.”9

  The family remained impervious to the despair that gripped so many Americans during the Dirty Thirties. On an essential level, in a way that could be perceived as beguilingly attractive during such desperate times, the Bard family didn’t give a damn. Not everyone found this quality endearing. To some, the Bards’ “so what?” attitude was just demented. When Blanche was trying to secure a date to escort her on an escapade of Mary’s, involving a visiting German baron who planned to treat Mary and her friends to an evening of dinner and dancing, she invited a Green Lake neighbor. “He was reluctant to accept,” Blanche remembered. “ ‘The Bards are all screwy,’ he said.”10

  During this period, the Bards were deeply in debt, as the public record bears out. Mary was sued by the Pacific Coast Coal Company for failing to pay for the coal that fueled the basement furnace. Later, an unpaid workman slapped a lien on the property. The family chipped away at bills, paying off a little here, a little there, like many other households during those grim years when simply not going under equaled success. They purchased everything they could on credit, shelling out payments to the most insistent creditors. Betty wrote of the stress induced by constant poverty, indebtedness, and relentless bill collectors: “A bill collector is a man with a loud voice who hates everybody. A collection agency is a collection of bill collectors with loud voices who hate everybody and always know where she works. . . . Each of my charge accounts had a collector, equipped apparently with second sight. They knew about my jobs before Mary found them for me and would often be milling around the door before I’d been properly hired.”11

  Using her daughters’ earnings, Sydney alternately paid off and fended off debt collectors who arrived in person at her front door. Collections letters that came in the mail were easily ignored, but not so a collector on the doorstep, which is why in-person bill collection became a common tactic in the 1930s. It made the experience of indebtedness and of being dunned for payment extremely personal. The arrival of collections agents at Betty’s workplaces compromised her efforts to appear professional. And it was humiliating.

  Sydney, as ever, seems to have reacted to penury with sanguine acceptance. If she could not afford to serve lamb, she served oxtail, meatloaf, or vegetable soup. If the electricity was shut off, her family ate by candlelight. This quality of utterly accepting circumstance was framed as heroism in Betty’s books. Perhaps it was, but for her daughters, it was also maddening. Sydney’s impulse toward unquestioning acquiescence had served her well during her marriage but served less well without Darsie’s well-reasoned leadership.

  “When I was young if I’d wanted sixty dollars for stockings, and there was only sixty dollars in the house, Mother would have given it to me,” Betty once told an interviewer.12 Her mother was “a truly charming and most talented woman, [who] has no more financial sense than a hummingbird, arguing with her about money is like trying to catch minnows in your fingers.”13 Sydney was not a religious woman—by and large, nor were the other Bards. And yet, Betty wrote, she “emanates an aura of peace that is actually visible. Mother says this is merely long practice in the face of disaster. I think it is an inner serenity that follows in the wake of selflessness.”14 This mesmeric calm smothered whatever assertive qualities Sydney might once have possessed. Although the demands of caring for a family placed her in a de facto leadership role, Sydney was a follower.

  Betty’s children, Anne and Joan, were left mainly in their grandmother’s care during these years. When the girls reached school age, Sydney enrolled them in Ravenna Elementary, a 1911 brick and concrete structure eight blocks east of the 15th Avenue house. Betty later acknowledged that she’d left the raising of Anne and Joan to her mother after her marriage to Bob ended. She plunged into the social life from which the Bards’ move to Chimacum, her disastrous marriage, and her successive pregnancies had plucked her. Betty accompanied Mary, or was dispatched by her, to plays and parties and bad dates, leaving Sydney to tend to things domestic.

  While their mother worked to put bread on the table, leaving them in their grandmother’s care, Anne and Joan—living in a house whose occupants evidently changed frequently, and with perhaps more freedom to roam than was best for them—sometimes got lost in the shuffle. In a house full to the gills with adult family members and colorful, eccentric friends, perhaps Betty and Sydney trusted that the girls would just join the parade. In many ways, Anne and Joan may have raised themselves, making their own decisions and crafting their own safety nets. Unlike Sydney’s own brood at those Montana campsites, Anne and Joan Heskett seem to have made their way through childhood without the precaution of a picket and a piece of string.

  In this haphazard childhood, however, their mother’s storytelling was a constant. In childhood, Betty had told her siblings stories to amuse them. Betty continued these stories for her own children, inventing a new character she called Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. She also began telling her friends stories about life in Chimacum, with the dual result of entertaining listeners and turning those strange, hard years into a narrative she controlled. For their own enjoyment, Mar
y and Betty spun out the ongoing saga of a sorority girl who bucks propriety but still finds romance and the ultimate grail, a marriage proposal. They thought “Sandra Surrenders” was at least as good as the serial stories the radio drooled out, and they submitted it, unsuccessfully, for publication.

  Determined to help Betty slam the door on her experiences in Chimacum, Mary launched her sister into projects that would shore up her battered self-esteem. Securing employment for Betty was the first priority, but Mary then applied herself to encouraging her sister’s literary pursuits. In January 1933, the Town Crier—where Mary and Betty’s friend Margaret Bundy Callahan was associate editor—published Betty’s short story “Their Families,” Betty’s first appearance in print.15 Although billed as fiction, “Their Families” strongly resembled the household Betty later described in her nonfiction book Anybody Can Do Anything. A Mary-inspired character took the lead: Judith Ten Eyck, the clever, red-haired eldest of a poor but witty and artistic family.

  At Mary’s urging, Sydney too tried writing, plotting out scripts for a fifteen-minute daily radio serial, Schuyler Square. Busy running the household, Sydney squeezed this work into her day as best she could: “About ten or eleven or one or two o’clock, Mother would slide into the breakfast nook to drink coffee, to smoke millions of cigarettes, to cough and to write, in her absolutely unreadable handwriting, her twenty pages on both sides of radio continuity,” Betty recalled.16 For nearly a year, the program was broadcast live from the KOL radio station in Rhodes Department Store in downtown Seattle, featuring Rhodes employees as performers. It was a novelty for shoppers, who watched the broadcasts through a wall of glass.

  Mary’s ability to create scenarios and animate her family’s participation in them was an asset. She encouraged Betty when life was grim. Mary’s ferocity drove her through the family’s loss of fortune and through the need to turn her back on college and find work. Even at the depth of the Depression, Mary was never without a job. She was engaged, so Betty tells us, several times, but when she married, it was to a man whose qualities were steadfast.

  On June 27, 1934, with Betty as matron of honor and Anne and Joan as flower girls, Mary wed Dr. Clyde Reynolds Jensen in Thomsen Memorial Chapel at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. Bridal showers and dinners honoring the couple preceded the wedding, with old family friends from the St. Nicholas days, Mary’s business associates, and a new circle of the groom’s medical colleagues rallying round. It was the closest to high society that the Bards had come in many years. Mary chose a dramatic wedding dress: sand beige with a cape trimmed in Russian wolf.17

  Born in Waco, Texas, and raised in Douglas, Nebraska, in modest circumstances, Clyde Jensen—“Jens”—graduated from Dartmouth College, then from Rush Medical College. He came to Seattle in April 1930 to join the staff at Harborview Hospital when that facility opened in February 1931. Trained in internal medicine, Jensen was also board certified in pathology and directed Harborview’s medical laboratories. He was steady, brave, and deeply dedicated to service, as the thousands of patients he went on to help during more than a half-century of medical practice, and his admiring medical colleagues, would eventually attest.

  The social leap for Mary was significant. Once married, her foremost task was learning how to be a doctor’s wife, as dictated by the requirements of that era. This role led, in time, to her serving on the Seattle Symphony and Repertory Theatre boards and as a Girl Scout leader. Her marriage shifted the balance between the sisters, and Mary turned from managing her natal family to building a family of her own. Fortunately, Betty respected Jens and was fond of him. If she was losing Mary’s close company, at least it was to someone she approved of.

  Betty’s own life was not without romance. Some of her suitors during those years remained dear friends. One was Goddard Lieberson, a young composer who was part of the Bards’ artistic circle. Betty met him in the early 1930s, when he was studying at the University of Washington. Lieberson later moved to New York and worked for Columbia Records, eventually becoming president of the company.18 Another male friend was George “Mike” Gordon, whom Betty met at a luncheon in 1934. He was considerably shorter than Betty, and sixty-four to her twenty-seven. “It never occurred to me he would consider himself my suitor,” she wrote, “and that he would endeavor during the next eight years to outsuit anyone else.”19

  Mike Gordon was generous to Betty’s family. He owned a lumber mill in Peshastin, a small town near Wenatchee in one of Washington’s prime apple- and pear-growing regions. He sent cases of fruit, vegetables, canned goods, and clothing to the Bard household during the family’s leanest years. Blanche Hamilton—showing the moxie born of long friendship—once asked Betty if she felt obligated to Mike for all he did for her family, and if Mike expected anything in return. “ ‘All I have to do is reach down and pat him on the cheek and make him laugh a lot,’ ” Betty replied.20

  After Mary’s marriage, her earnings no longer supported the family, but nineteen-year-old Dede’s income, combined with Betty’s, kept the Bard household more or less afloat. Cleve, who worked as a car salesman, had married in 1933; it is not clear whether he was ever part of the 15th Avenue household. In August 1933, Betty began working for the National Recovery Administration (NRA), established by Congress to help revive labor and industry and stimulate America’s crippled economy. Betty worked in Seattle’s Exchange Building as an NRA labor adjustor—one of a very few women in the position—until the program shut down at the end of 1935. In January 1936, the U.S. Treasury Department hired her as a junior clerk in their procurement department. The office bought supplies and let contracts for the Works Progress/Projects Administration (WPA).

  Betty’s five years working at these government jobs brought a measure of financial stability, along with experiences of absurd regulatory bureaucracy that made good stories. By 1938, life at the Bards’ was fairly stable: Alison was at Roosevelt High School, Anne and Joan in grade school. Dede was a secretary for the WPA. Mary and Jens were living in the Madrona neighborhood and had two daughters, Mari and Salli. But this stability was shattered when Betty was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one. On September 23, 1938, she entered Firland Sanatorium, Seattle’s municipal tuberculosis hospital, twelve miles north of what was then the city line.21 Anne and Joan remained with Sydney.

  Tuberculosis is a highly contagious disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which can be inhaled or contracted through contaminated food or drink. The most common form is pulmonary tuberculosis (an infection of the lungs), but the bacteria can also infect the kidneys, bones, intestines, and lymph nodes. Miliary tuberculosis, known colloquially as galloping consumption, occurs when the infection is spread throughout the body in the bloodstream. Tuberculous meningitis, the most deadly form of the disease, is an infection of the tissue around the brain and spinal cord. When Betty was admitted to Firland, tuberculosis ranked sixth among causes of death in Seattle. People called it the white plague.

  In the absence of any effective medication before the development of antibiotics, treatment focused on providing rest, wholesome food, and fresh air in dedicated sanatoria, where patients were isolated to prevent the spread of the disease. The sanatoria movement began in Germany in 1849. The first American facility, Dr. Edward L. Trudeau’s Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium, opened in Saranac Lake, New York, in 1885.

  Betty’s X-rays revealed a tubercular cavity in her left lung and a shadow in her right lung. She traced her infection to one of her fellow Treasury Department employees: “For two years I had been very concerned about a co-worker of mine in the Government service, who looked like a cadaver and coughed constantly, with a dry little hacking cough, most of the time in my face. ‘I think that man has tuberculosis,’ I finally told my boss excitedly. ‘Who don’t?’ was his laconic reply. When I entered the sanatorium and filed a compensation claim against the Government, naming the cadaverous co-worker as a possible source of infection, he was sent to a t.b. cl
inic and found to have had active, communicable tuberculosis for nineteen years.”22

  For Betty, hospitalization halted everything. “Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember nothing about the urgent errands. You can’t even remember where you were going,” Betty later wrote.23

  Having used up all of her accrued sick leave and annual leave, she wrote to her supervisor from her hospital bed, resigning her position. It seems likely that Mary and Jens helped Sydney and Dede cover the loss of Betty’s income. Mary told Betty not to worry about money, but Betty could not help being overwhelmed when considering how to support her children, or, worse (as she would later write), imagining Anne and Joan laying flowers on her grave.

  Admission to Firland was, in one sense, a lucky break for Betty. Hers was one of nearly two thousand diagnosed tuberculosis cases in Seattle in 1938.24 Firland, where the cost of care was covered by Washington State and Seattle departments of health, had only a fraction of the number of beds required to hospitalize these individuals. The sanatorium’s admissions policy favored patients whose disease had been diagnosed early: those whose disease was diagnosed at an advanced stage instead entered King County Hospital, which provided considerably less specialized care. For those with means, there were private sanatoria and nursing homes. Many tuberculosis patients remained at home under the care of family and visiting health department nurses, although this treatment was less effective and exposed family members to the risk of infection.