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

by Paula Becker

  7Date Books (1920–31), Box 4, Herbert H. Gowen Papers (Accession #1561–72–13), University of Washington Special Collections. The Gowens’ address was 5005 22nd Avenue Northeast. This house still stands and as of 2015 was the site of the Chambered Nautilus Bed and Breakfast.

  8ST, July 17, 1927.

  9MacDonald, Egg, 204. In the book, Betty is seventeen.

  10Washington Department of Health Certificate of Live Birth, #146–1928–004792.

  11The initial complaint in this case (King County Superior Court Case 203047, PSRA) is not dated, but the answer to the complaint is date-stamped September 15, 1927.

  12H. K. Blonde was named in this Seattle litigation because of his real-estate wrangling with Sydney in Jefferson County. Percy M. Wright is also named, probably because at the time he was involved in his own suit against Blonde over a different piece of Jefferson County property.

  13It is possible that the Wrights and the Bards had traded houses, since the Wrights’ Chimacum home was directly next to the Bards’ dairy property. Purchasing lots 1 and 2 would have given Wright property on which to build his own residence.

  14The Jefferson County school census indicates that the family was receiving their mail at the Tarboo post office, southwest of Chimacum. Margaret Bundy Callahan recalled the Bards’ moving to a smaller farm with a large flock of chickens after the dairy property was lost.

  15Affidavit of Robert E. Heskett, July 22, 1931, King County Superior Court Case #243838. In the book, Betty and Bob pay $450 cash and bring home the deed.

  16H. A. Norse, “Alderwood Manor Demonstration,” Poultry Herald, February 1922.

  17Some modern maps still delineate the area where Betty and Bob lived as Center, but Jefferson County property tax files refer to it as Chimacum.

  18For more on Egg and I Road, see Paula Becker, “Jefferson County Resolution Officially Establishes Egg and I Road in Center on February 3, 1981,” www.historylink.org, September 12, 2007.

  19Bud’s full name was Edward Leroy Bishop (1917–97).

  20Washington State Department of Health Certificate of Live Birth #146–1929–003831.

  21No draft versions of The Egg and I appear to survive, but Betty MacDonald’s correspondence with her literary agent, Bernice Baumgarten, and her publisher, J. B. Lippincott, mentions the need to reduce the discussion of illegal alcohol.

  22“Edward Leroy ‘Bud’ Bishop, Logger and Custom Farmer of Chimacum Valley,” Jefferson County Historical Society Oral History Project, Volume 42, 1992, Jefferson County Historical Society Research Center, Port Townsend, Washington.

  23The Bards’ ongoing presence in Jefferson County is attested by the annual School Census.

  24Sydney, Cleve, Dede, Alison, and Gammy were enumerated as renters, appearing on the April 1930 census form next to Edward, Ilah, and Bud Bishop. In 2014, Ed and Ilah Bishop’s daughter-in-law, Aldena Bishop (Bud’s widow), refuted the idea that the Bards rented from the Bishops. Sydney and her family might, however, have rented Betty and Bob’s Pioneer House. The Seattle Public Schools records for fall 1930 show Dede attending Roosevelt High School and Alison at Ravenna Elementary.

  25Gammy died on December 14, 1936. Her ashes were interred at Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder.

  26King County Civil Court Case 232270, PSRA.

  27Summons, filed June 27, 1930, King County Civil Court Case 232270, PSRA.

  28Jefferson County Deed Record Vol. 101, 300, #66276, Eastern Branch of Washington State Archives, Bellingham, Washington.

  29“Notes on Conference with Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I, Re: The Bishop Suits, Date: January 27, 1950,” Betty MacDonald Collection, Vashon Heritage Museum Archive, Vashon Island, Washington.

  30MacDonald family archives.

  31King County Civil Court Case 243838, PSRA. Betty’s attorney this time was George Walsteed.

  32Summons, July 16, 1931, King County Superior Court Case #243838, PSRA.

  33MacDonald, Anybody, 35.

  34“Vital Statistics: Divorces per 1,000 Marriages (National),” 106; and “Washington Divorces per 1,000 Marriages,” Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 1933, 107. http://istmat.info/files/uploads/47672/statistical_abstracts_1933.pdf.

  35California instituted the nation’s first no-fault divorce laws in 1969. In 1977, Washington’s only grounds for divorce were the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage.

  36“Complaint,” July 16, 1931, King County Civil Case 243838, PSRA.

  37“Affidavit of Robert E. Heskett,” July 22, 1931, King County Civil Court Case 243838, PSRA.

  38“Order to pay support money and dismiss restraining order,” July 28, 1931, King County Civil Court Case 243838, PSRA.

  39“Answer,” July 31, 1931, King County Civil Court Case 243838, PSRA. “Reply,” August 21, 1931, King County Civil Court Case 243838, PSRA.

  40“Ex-Husband Pays Family $10 under ‘Added Stimulus,’ ” ST, January 17, 1936.

  41Betty could have finalized the divorce as early as November 1932. Her reason for waiting is unclear.

  42Joan was asked this question by a member of the audience during a Betty MacDonald Day celebration at the Vashon branch of King County Library, May 26, 2001. In summer 2014, I put the question to Anne MacDonald Canham. She too said she never saw her father after the divorce.

  43“Affidavit of Service,” April 12, 1944, King County Civil Court Case 243838, PSRA.

  44Betty MacDonald calls this neighborhood the University District, but in the intervening years the neighborhood has developed a separate identity and is now considered the Roosevelt District. The University District lies south of the Roosevelt District.

  CHAPTER FOUR. ESPECIALLY BETTY

  1MacDonald, Anybody, 44, 131.

  2Caffiere, Much Laughter, 42.

  3Callahan, ed., Margaret Callahan, 256.

  4Ibid., 384.

  5Betty Bard’s National Industrial Recovery Administration personal history record, undated but probably from fall 1933, Official Personnel Folders, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri. This document states incorrectly that Betty was born on March 26, 1906 (not 1907). It may have been during an attempt to correct this inaccuracy that Betty veered in the opposite direction, giving 1908 as her birth year. The document states Betty’s height to be 67 inches (5 feet 7 inches), her weight 125 pounds, her hair red, her eyes gray.

  6MacDonald, Anybody, 157.

  7Town Crier, October 8, 1932, December 8, 1932.

  8Folder “Texts related to the memoir,” Box 1, Margaret Bundy Callahan papers, University of Washington Special Collections.

  9Caffiere, Much Laughter, 40.

  10Ibid., 44.

  11MacDonald, Anybody, 146, 162.

  12Robert van Gelder, “Interview with a Best-Selling Author: Betty MacDonald,” Cosmopolitan, November 1947.

  13MacDonald, Anybody, 148.

  14Betty MacDonald, “An Unforgettable Character,” Reader’s Digest, February 1954, 91.

  15Town Crier, January 14 and 21, 1933. In 2015, the Book Club of Washington reissued “Their Families” as a chapbook.

  16MacDonald, Anybody, 180.

  17“Miss Mary Bard Becomes Bride of Dr. Clyde Jensen,” ST, June 27, 1934.

  18“Goddard Lieberson, of Record Company, Dies,” ST, May 30, 1977.

  19Betty MacDonald, “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met,” Reader’s Digest, July 1949, 11.

  20Caffiere, Much Laughter, 96. Gordon eventually held a mortgage on the 15th Avenue house. At Gordon’s funeral in 1947, Betty delivered a eulogy, and Don MacDonald was an honorary pallbearer.

  21In 1943, King County assumed responsibility for Firland. In 1947, patients from Firland and the former King County tuberculosis sanatoria, Morning-side and Meadows, were transferred to a decommissioned naval hospital at 15th Avenue Northeast and 150th Street in Seattle. The name Firland was retained for the new facility, which had 1,350 beds. It was closed in 1973.

  22MacDonald, Plague, 31.

 
; 23Ibid., 11.

  24“Tuberculosis (All Forms) in Seattle,” Report of the Department of Health and Sanitation, Seattle, 1936, 1937, 1938, table 21, submitted to Seattle City Council November 1, 1939. The chart shows rates per 100,000 residents. Seattle had 387,371 citizens in 1938. Tuberculosis killed 761 that year.

  25See Barron H. Lerner, Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis along the Skid Road (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 28.

  26Dr. Stith would almost certainly have preferred to outlaw child visits completely. Faced with the prospect of never seeing their children, however, some patients might have refused to enter the sanatorium. Stith therefore compromised.

  27MacDonald, Plague, 152.

  28“Firland Sanatorium,” Report of the Department of Health and Sanitation, Seattle, 1936, 1937, 1938.

  29Chester Kerr to Betty Bard, April 10, 1941.

  30In the final installment of the serialized version of Plague (Good Housekeeping, October 1948, 293), Betty is introduced to Donald MacDonald by a friend shortly after her release from Firland. This incident is omitted from the book.

  31Beulah was Clinton MacDonald’s second wife, and they had four children, including Don. Don had five older half-siblings who were apparently out of the house when the family moved to Seattle.

  32This law was enacted in 1909, the year the Anti-tuberculosis League of King County was founded. It was still in force in 1970.

  33Telephone interview with Anne MacDonald Canham, May 21, 2014.

  34By an odd coincidence, this duplex was a stone’s throw from the Gowen home, where Betty and Bob were married. Some family members report that Anne and Joan lived with the Jensen family for some period after Betty and Don’s marriage.

  35Clyde and Mary Bard Jensen’s daughters are Mari Hildegarde Jensen Clack, born May 28, 1936; Salli Dorothea Jensen Rogers, born November 16, 1937; and Heidi Elizabeth Jensen Rabel, born January 5, 1940.

  36It is unclear why Betty and Don did not simply remain in Sydney’s 15th Avenue house.

  CHAPTER FIVE. EGGED ON

  1Cleve Bard led one of the unsuccessful pushes to build a bridge linking Vashon with the mainland.

  2Betty MacDonald, “All That Glitters Isn’t!” Washington Alumnus, Fall 1947, 6.

  3Variations were widely reported. Suzanne Martin, “Counterpoint,” SP-I, n.d., Betty MacDonald Collection clippings file, Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Association.

  4Around 1940, Betty likely attended creative writing seminars at the University of Washington led by the English professor George Milton Savage. Savage taught personal narrative, and Betty later referred hopeful writers to him. In an October 18, 1945, letter to her friend Guy Williams, Betty recalled that Williams suggested that she write about her Chimacum experiences to try and get her mind off a failed romantic entanglement. This would have been around 1940–41.

  5The firm from which Betty was fired was the West Construction Company, where she had been employed as office manager. One of Betty’s coworkers apparently let slip the real reason for Betty’s absence.

  6Transcript of radio interview between Betty MacDonald and George Fisher, n.d., Folder “Promotion,” Box 411, USC Cinematic Arts Library Universal-International Pictures Collection.

  7Betty’s first letter to Brandt & Brandt is undated. Betty also submitted “Patsy, Who Would Not Take a Bath” to Simon and Schuster (March 1, 1944) and Reynal & Hitchcock, the publisher of P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins series (March 2, 1944).

  8MacDonald, Anybody, 253.

  9Bernice Baumgarten to Betty MacDonald, October 18, 1944. Unless otherwise noted, material relating to Betty’s relationship with Brandt & Brandt and Lippincott is drawn from private family archives.

  10Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, October 23, 1944.

  11Betty apparently breached this barrier: the only author dinner Baumgarten ever hosted at her home during her fifty-year career was for Betty and Don. Cozzens—whose tongue was as sharp as Betty’s and whose opinions were often expressed as extremes—spoiled the event by making fun of The Egg and I.

  12Egg made a secondary serial appearance in Liberty magazine after the book was published, and was condensed for Reader’s Digest.

  13Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, May 4, 1945.

  14The denser format was used until new plates were struck in February 1946, for the book’s twelfth impression.

  15Louise Dickinson Rich, We Took to the Woods (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1942), 278.

  16Martin, “Counterpoint.” Ironically, the back flap of the dust jacket on the earliest impressions of Egg bore an advertisement for We Took to the Woods. By the fifth impression (one of three in October 1945), the ad had been replaced with glowing book-review blurbs under the heading “The Critics Are Cackling over The Egg and I.”

  17MacDonald, Egg, 46, 111, 60, 106, 41.

  18William Cumming, Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), 179, 183.

  19MacDonald, Egg, 210.

  20Betty’s daughters, Anne and Joan, addressed this issue in 1987, when they jointly issued an introduction to a new paperback edition of the book: “We are certain that if Betty were alive today, she would address the plight of the American Indian in a much different manner. We feel that she only meant to turn what was to her a frightening situation into a lighthearted encounter.” Anne MacDonald Evans and Joan MacDonald Keil’s introduction to Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).

  21Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, November 28, 1945.

  22Betty MacDonald to Norah Flannery, October 18, 1945. The median yearly household income in the United States in 1945 was less than three thousand dollars. “Family and Individual Money Income in the United States: 1945,” Department of Commerce Current Population Reports Consumer Income, Series P-60, No. 2, March 2, 1948, www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60–002.pdf.

  23For information on Betty MacDonald’s interactions with Lippincott and Lippincott’s promotion of the book (and Betty’s subsequent eight books), I rely primarily on reports from Publisher’s Weekly and Betty’s correspondence with Lippincott and Bernice Baumgarten. After decades of sales and mergers, archival materials from J. B. Lippincott Company appear no longer to exist. Brandt & Brandt still exists as Brandt & Hochman, but the firm holds none of Betty’s correspondence (Charles Schlessiger, longtime Brandt & Hochman literary agent, personal correspondence, September 26, 2014).

  24The Plague and I, Anybody Can Do Anything, and Onions in the Stew made the New York Times weekly best-seller list, but not the yearly. Plague was number 10 on the Publisher’s Weekly nonfiction best-seller list for 1948.

  25Betty’s head shot was taken by the Seattle photographer Leonid Fink in his studio in the White-Henry-Stuart Building, 1318 4th Avenue, in early January 1945. Fink was not credited. Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, dated January 16, 1944, but contextually clearly written in 1945. Lippincott and Betty got lucky: among the formal portraits of Betty MacDonald, only this shot of Fink’s reveals her merriness.

  26J. A. McKaughan to Betty MacDonald, October 19, 1945.

  27McKaughan alerted Bernice Baumgarten to Lippincott’s plan to change the cover in a letter of December 17, 1945.

  28Betty never liked the photo, which she thought showed too much of her teeth, and tried early on to convince Lippincott to substitute another.

  29Betty MacDonald to Bertram Lippincott, January 15, 1946.

  30Sydney accompanied Betty and Don for the first leg of the trip, then traveled alone to visit her brother Jim, returning to Seattle by rail.

  31Betty MacDonald to Joan, Mary, Jens, Mari, Salli, and Heidi [Joan MacDonald, Mary Bard Jensen, Clyde Jensen, Mari Jensen, Salli Jensen, Heidi Jensen], dated “Monday night” [February 4, 1946?].

  32Betty MacDonald to Joan, Friday, February 8, 1946.

  33Betty MacDonald to Joan, Mary, Mari, Salli, Heidi, and Jens, February 16, 1946.

/>   34New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1946.

  35“Lippincott Celebrates Millionth Copy of ‘The Egg and I,’ ” Publisher’s Weekly, September 7, 1946, 1232.

  36“About People You Know,” ST, September 1, 1946.

  37This figure is calculated as follows: 257 days elapsed between launch (October 3, 1945) and the millionth copy (August 15, 1946), yielding a rate of 3,891 books printed per day, 162.1 books per hour, 2.7 books per minute, or one book every 22 seconds.

  38“1,000,001 Egg and I,” ST, September 13, 1946. The presentation copies were most likely bound in either green or gold leather; reports vary. Their current whereabouts is unclear.

  CHAPTER SIX. SMELLING LIKE SUGAR COOKIES

  1MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, frontispiece.

  2Betty MacDonald to J. A. McKaughan, November 18, 1946.

  3MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, 10.

  4“New Betty MacDonald Book for Children Out This Week,” ST, March 23, 1947.

  5Christianna Brand, Nurse Matilda (Leicester, UK: Brockhampton, 1964) was published after Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. The two other characters predate Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s first print appearance: Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus first appeared in book form in 1881 and P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins in 1934.

  6Caffiere, Much Laughter, 28.

  7Betty MacDonald to Hildegarde Hopkins, December 7, 1949.

  8Eunice Blake to Betty MacDonald, March 22, 1956.

  9Betty MacDonald to Heidi, Becky, and Timmy [Heidi Keil, Rebecca Keil, Tim Keil], February 19, 1957.

  10Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, April 27, 1957.

  11Betty’s letter to Knight apparently has not survived. Knight’s letter to Betty is in the MacDonald family archives. In 2007, HarperCollins brought out new editions of the Piggle-Wiggle books, replacing all the illustrations except Sendak’s with new illustrations by Alexandra Boiger. Neither Boiger nor HarperCollins staff could explain why Sendak’s work was again retained, and my query to a representative of Sendak’s estate went unanswered.

  12New York Times Book Review, March 30, 1947, 29.