by Paula Becker
ANNE ELIZABETH CAMPBELL BARD HESKETT MACDONALD [Betsy, Betty] (1907–58): Second child of Darsie and Sydney Bard. Married Robert Eugene Heskett [Bob] (1895–1951). Their daughters were Anne and Joan. Subsequently married Donald Chauncey MacDonald [Don] (1910–75), who adopted Anne and Joan.
SIDNEY CLEVELAND BARD [Cleve] (1908–80): Third child of Darsie and Sydney Bard. Married Margaret Tracy Howard Bard Gabbard (1909–99). Her son was Alvin Tracy Howard, who used the name Alvin Tracy Bard. Cleve subsequently married Mary Alice Miller Schoeppel Bard (1921–2004). Their sons were James and Sam.
SYLVIA REMSEN BARD (1912–13): Fourth child of Darsie and Sydney Bard.
DOROTHEA DARSIE BARD GOLDSMITH [Dede] (1915–94): Fifth child of Darsie and Sydney Bard. Married Melvin Goldsmith [Goldy] (1915–76). Their sons were Steven, Christopher, and David.
ALISON CLEVELAND BARD SUGIA BECK BURNETT [Alty] (1920–2009): Sixth child of Darsie and Sydney Bard. Married Frank Sugia (1920–94). Their sons were Darsie and Bard. Alison subsequently married Emil Bernard Beck [Bernard] (1919–97). She later married William Burnett (1924–78).
ANNE ELIZABETH CAMPBELL MACDONALD STRUNK EVANS CANHAM [Andy] (b. 1928): Betty’s eldest daughter. Married Donald Strunk [Little Don] (1928–2002). Their children were Donald Jonathan Strunk [Johnny] and Anne Elizabeth Campbell Strunk [Betsy]. Subsequently married Robert Evans [Bob] (1924–2005). Their children were Robert Darsie Evans [Darsie] and Joan E. Evans [Joanie]. She later married Donald Ray Canham (b. 1934).
JOAN SYDNEY MACDONALD KEIL [Joanie] (1929–2004): Betty’s younger daughter. Married Girard Keil [Jerry] (1922–2000). Their children were Heidi Anne Keil, Rebecca Joan Keil [Becky], Timothy Girard Keil [Tim, Timmy], and Toby E. Keil.
BETTY’S HOUSES: PLACE AS WITNESS
These are private residences, and visitors should respect the privacy of those who live there. Years listed reflect tenancy, not necessarily ownership. For archival and modern photographs of Betty and Mary’s houses, visit HistoryLink.org and search for “Betty MacDonald Slideshow.”
Bards in Portland, Oregon: 1241 Williams Avenue (1897–1901).
Sandersons in Boston: 131 Newbury Street (as lodgers) (1900).
BARDS IN BUTTE, MONTANA
415 West Granite Street (1903–5).
846 West Copper Street (1905).
BARDS IN ELKO COUNTY, NEVADA
Agee Ranch, Spruce Mountain (1905).
BARDS IN ELY, NEVADA
Mining camp (1906).
BARDS IN BOULDER, COLORADO
723 Spruce Street (formerly 725) (1906–7).
BARDS IN PLACERVILLE, IDAHO
Star Ranch Road (1908–10).
BARDS IN BUTTE, MONTANA
1039 West Granite Street (1910–16).
BARDS IN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Former Danish consulate: 2212 Everett Avenue East (formerly 2212 13th Avenue North) (1916–18).
Laurelhurst, 5120 Northeast 42nd Street (formerly East). The Bards’ property comprised the lots on which 5114, 5120, and 5126 now sit (1918–25).
BARDS AND HESKETTS IN JEFFERSON COUNTY, WASHINGTON
Sydney: Large parcel near 5700 Beaver Valley Road, Chimacum (1925–27).
Betty and Robert Heskett: 2021 Egg and I Road, Chimacum (formerly 711 Swansonville Road, Center) (1927–30).
Sydney in Center/Chimacum: Exact location(s) unknown (1928–30).
BARDS, JENSENS, AND MACDONALDS IN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Mary, 3519 Main Street (1928), 2700 4th Avenue, Apartment 69 (1930).
Bards, 15th Avenue house: 6317 15th Avenue Northeast (demolished) (1930–42).
Clyde and Mary Bard Jensen, 706 Bellevue Ave East (formerly North) (1934–35).
Clyde and Mary Bard Jensen, apartment across from Maynard Hospital, 1222 Summit Avenue (1936). (Maynard Hospital has been demolished.)
Jensens, 623 37th Avenue (demolished) (1936–42).
Betty at Firland Sanatorium: 19303 Fremont Avenue North, Shoreline (1938–39).
Jensens, 1716 36th Avenue (1942–58).
MacDonald duplex, 5045 22nd Avenue Northeast (formerly 5041½ 22nd Avenue Northeast) (1942).
MacDonalds on Howe Street: 905 East Howe Street (1947–49, then intermittently until late 1952).
MACDONALDS ON VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON
MacDonald Vashon house: 11814 Dolphin Point Trail (1942–1955).
MacDonald Vashon barn: 12000 99th Avenue Southwest (1948–1955).
MACDONALDS IN CARMEL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Corral de Tierra Ranch, 907 Los Laureles Grade (Marker 26) (Betty 1952–57; Don 1952–75).
JENSENS ON VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON
13901 Southwest 220th Street, Vashon, Washington (Mary 1958–70; Jens 1958–88).
BARDISMS
Authing: being an author
Betty Jean: a spoiled little girl wearing frilly new clothes
Big Black Future, Black Future Charlie: predictor of doom and gloom
Body Thinko: someone who is primarily interested in sex
Bud and Polly’s: public toilets
Choke cookies: bakery cookies, usually dry
Criminal girl: Bard name for Mary’s maids
Get-happy: someone who exhibits false cheer
Get-in-good-with-the-company: someone who flatters others in order to get ahead
GooGoo: someone who talks in a baby voice or high voice to get their own way; someone who wants everything for themselves; someone who acts childishly
Hootey-Poo: a snooty person
Kick-Me-Charlie: a pessimistic defeatist
LeRoy: a person who is corny or common
My-husband-saider: a woman who quotes her husband constantly
Pee-pee talker: a person who uses barnyard talk and four-letter words
Saddo: a person consumed with self-pity
Smellbadall: an obnoxious person of either sex
Toecover: useless handmade item
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
Anybody
Betty MacDonald, Anybody Can Do Anything (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1950)
Egg
Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1945)
Margaret Callahan
Brian Tobey Callahan, ed., Margaret Callahan: Mother of Northwest Art (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2009)
Much Laughter
Blanche Caffiere, Much Laughter, a Few Tears: Memoirs of a Woman’s Friendship with Betty MacDonald and Her Family (Vashon, WA: Blue Gables, 1992)
Onions
Betty MacDonald, Onions in the Stew (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1955).
Plague
Betty MacDonald, The Plague and I (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1948)
SP-I
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
ST
Seattle Times
PROLOGUE
1MacDonald, Anybody, 42.
2Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1947), 11.
3MacDonald, Egg, 138.
4Paula Becker, “Time Traveling the Roosevelt District with Betty MacDonald,” Seattle Press, February 14, 2002, 8.
CHAPTER ONE. THE RICHEST HILL ON EARTH
1Biennial Report of the Inspector of Mines of the State of Montana for the Years 1905–6, Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, Butte, Montana.
2Thalimer is spelled Tholimer in Anybody, 95.
3Darsie Bard stated on a Harvard questionnaire that he had lived in Lincoln, Illinois; Carthage, Missouri; Rollinsville, Colorado; Minneapolis, Minnesota; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Portland, Oregon.
4“Portland Student Weds,” Oregonian, March 25, 1903.
5Information about Darsie’s expenses and work activities is from the Class of 1903 survey, Harvard College, Class of 1903, Secretary’s Files, Harvard University Archives. All other Harvard statistics are from “Harvard in 1900,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt Suite website, www.fdrsuite.org/FDRcourseofstudy.html, accessed A
pril 20, 2015. Roosevelt’s time at Harvard (1900–1904) overlapped with Darsie’s, although whether they were acquainted is unknown.
6James Bard apparently went by both Bard and Barde, usually the latter. Darsie and subsequent family members used the form Bard. Historic newspapers and official documents often refer to James and Anne (or Ann) Barde.
7MacDonald, Egg, 13.
8James Bard died on November 20, 1921. He was staying with his sister in Carthage, Missouri, when his nightclothes caught fire from an open gas stove, and he burned to death, according to Missouri State Board of Health Certificate of Death #29626.
9Class of 1903 survey, Harvard College.
10Darsie worked for ACM until 1905, then as a field engineer for an exploration company. This work took him to Canada, Mexico, and throughout the Western United States.
11Sydney’s use of the name was never formalized, and she appears as Elsie Sanderson Bard on official documents. It is unclear why she opted for the slightly altered spelling.
12Sydney’s father was a bookkeeper, solidly middle class.
13F. Sommer Schmidt to Betty MacDonald, May 8, 1947.
14It is noteworthy that Mary Bard, who wrote of her life as a doctor’s wife in an era when doctors were almost invariably male, was helped into the world by a woman doctor.
15F. Sommer Schmidt to Betty MacDonald, May 8, 1947.
16The Bards rented 725 Spruce Street. The house has since been renumbered and is now 723 Spruce Street. Built around 1872, it is among the oldest houses in Boulder and predates by a decade the Mapleton Hill Addition neighborhood in which it stands.
17The Chautauqua movement began in 1874 and lasted until about 1930. Boulder’s Chautauqua compound (now known as the Colorado Chautauqua) is one of the few that survive.
18The veterinarian was William Fields, 603 Spruce Street.
19The church is located at 1419 Pine Street, Boulder, Colorado.
20Cathy Bredlau, a diligent Betty MacDonald researcher, thought to investigate baptismal records and made the find. Other official and unofficial documents, including Betty’s high school and college transcripts and the U.S. Federal Censuses for 1910, 1920, and 1930, confirm that she was born in 1907.
21MacDonald, Egg, 15.
22Ibid., 16.
23Placer mining involves using hydraulic hoses to wash gold out of stream beds and into inclined troughs called sluices.
24Star Ranch Road no longer exists under that name, and the site of the Bards’ cabin is not identifiable. Betty spells her brother’s name Sydney in The Egg and I.
25Betty states in Egg that she celebrated her fifth birthday in Auburn, but it was probably her fourth, since the family was well settled back in Butte by her fifth.
26MacDonald, Egg, 17.
27All six of Sydney’s children were born at home, like almost all babies during this era. In The Doctor Wears Three Faces, Mary Bard states that her mother bore five children and that all were living at time of writing, erasing Sylvia from the family narrative. Betty also erases Sylvia, stating in the second paragraph of Anybody that her parents’ marriage produced four daughters and one son.
28Decades later, when Betty’s youngest sister, Alison, had a stillborn daughter, several of Betty’s letters mentioned Sydney’s deep grief. Sydney, she said with some bitterness, was worshipping at the shrine of Alison.
29In “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met” ( Reader’s Digest, July 1949, 15), Betty described her abhorrence of funerals, calling them “outmoded and barbaric rites.”
30Cleve was baptized November 12, 1911, at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Butte.
31Sylvia Remsen Bard, 1912–13, is buried at the Mount Moriah Cemetery, Butte, block A2, lot 171, grave 2. The only marked grave in lot 171 belongs to June Goodrich, 1899–1928.
32The school is located at 915 W. Park Street.
33MacDonald, Plague, 13.
34Janet L. Finn, Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900–1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2013), 143.
35They stayed at the New Washington Hotel, now the Josephinum.
36On June 8, 1917, less than a year after the Bards moved to Seattle, an explosion and subsequent fire in Butte’s Granite Mountain mine killed 168 miners. It was the deadliest disaster in metal-mining history. The tragedy prompted a general strike demanding safer working conditions in the mines, which was followed by the retaliatory murder of an IWW organizer.
CHAPTER TWO. FATE ALTERS THE PLOT
1MacDonald, Egg, 28.
2Bard & Johnson leased office 2105, on the building’s north side, on the highest full floor. L.C. Smith Building, Seattle (Seattle: De Luxe, 1932).
3Seattle also had (and has) a Women’s University Club, founded in 1914.
4The archival records of the Seattle public schools do not reflect the enrollment of any of the Bards at Lowell, for reasons unclear. Information regarding their enrollment is documented by Betty’s application for employment with the National Recovery Administration around 1933. Cleve does not appear ever to have attended private school.
5This building has been demolished. In 1926, the school built a new facility at 1501 10th Avenue East. In 1971, St. Nicholas merged with Lakeside School.
6Untitled article, ST, October 17, 1917; “Fete Day for Nursery to Be Lively Affair Next Tuesday,” ST, August 3, 1919.
7MacDonald, Anybody, 32. The dancers Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova toured widely, and both performed in Seattle.
8The legal description of the property is The Palisades, block 4, lots 3–4. Darsie purchased the property from University Investment Company.
9King County Property Tax General Index, Puget Sound Regional Branch of Washington State Archives, Bellevue, Washington. The homesteaders were John and Bridget Hildebrand.
10Darsie and Elsie purchased The Palisades, block 4, lots 1–2, from Daniel Lesh on May 3, 1919. E. C. Bard (Gammy) was paying property taxes on The Palisades, block 4, lots 5–6 in 1920, and on lot 5 only in 1925.
11In 1922, city bus service finally extended to Laurelhurst. The neighborhood now abuts University Village, an upscale shopping center near Seattle’s University District.
12Margaret B. Callahan, “Story of a Full Life,” ST, July 3, 1949.
13Recounted in Betty MacDonald to Cynthia Waldrop, July 18, 1950.
14Darsie was lodging at the Silver Bow Club, next door to the county courthouse, when he fell ill. “Body of Geologist Shipped to Seattle,” Butte Miner, January 25, 1920.
15Several newspaper articles state that Darsie died on January 23, but his death certificate gives the date as January 24. He probably died shortly after midnight.
16Silver Bow County death certificate #26333, Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, Butte, Montana.
17Anaconda Standard, January 24, 1920. Darsie Bard’s name was frequently misspelled as Darcy or Darcey.
18King County Government Judicial Administration Superior Court Probate Case #26751, microfilm at Puget Sound Regional Branch of Washington State Archives, Bellevue, Washington (hereafter PSRA).
19ST, May 24, 1920.
20It is impossible to know whether Sydney ever purchased these bonds. If she purchased them in the month when the judge released funds for her to do so, they would have matured in June 1925.
21This and the following details of the case are presented as Sydney stated them in King County Superior Court Case 203047, PSRA.
22Callahan, “Story of a Full Life.”
23Caffiere, Much Laughter, 15.
24Ibid., 23. If Alison was two at the time, Dede would have been seven.
25MacDonald, Plague, 23. Gammy was referring to her grandchildren’s refusal to consume her unappetizing homemade jam.
26Folder “Texts related to the memoir,” Box 1, Margaret Bundy Callahan papers, University of Washington Special Collections, Seattle.
27Brian Tobey Callahan, ed., Margaret Callahan: Mother of Northwest Art (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2009), 388.
28L
incoln High School Totem, 1922, 32.
29The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Washington’s first world’s fair, drew 3.7 million visitors.
30Roosevelt High School Strenuous Life, 1924, 21.
31“The Mandarin,” ST, December 2, 1923.
32“With Hot Days,” ST, May 18, 1924.
33This location is now the parking lot of the University Congregational Church.
34This building was demolished shortly after the Mandarin’s tenure. The retail building currently on the site was constructed in 1926 and as of 2015 was occupied by the Buffalo Exchange.
35“Last Week I Had Luncheon at the Mandarin,” ST, October 19, 1924.
36This location is now the parking lot of the University Book Store.
37“The Mandarin Has Moved,” ST, April 19, 1925.
38Caffiere, Much Laughter, 37.
39King County Civil Court Case #187992, PSRA.
40Sydney appears in these records as Elsie Bard.
41Caffiere, Much Laughter, 37.
42Callahan, Margaret Callahan, 386.
43Mary may have initially moved to the farm, but she was back in Seattle working by 1927.
CHAPTER THREE. CHILD BRIDE
1Ferry service connected Port Ludlow and Port Townsend to Seattle.
2October 12, 1928.
3Caffiere, Much Laughter, 38. Betty was twenty, not eighteen. Bob was thirty-one.
4Mary described Heskett thus to Betty’s attorney, George Guttormsen, in 1946, when Universal-International Pictures needed a physical description to aid the private investigator hired to secure Bob’s signed release from liability.
5MacDonald, Egg, 37.
6King County Marriage Records, 1855–1990, Robert E. Haskett [sic]– Anne Elizabeth C. Bard (Reference Number kingcoarchmcvol16_873), Washington State Digital Archives, www.digitalarchive.wa.gov. Herbert Gowen was the father of Betty’s friend Sylvia Gowen.
