by Paula Becker
2I was told that the property’s current owner has built a mansion near the peak, constructed so as not to be visible from the road and accessed by helicopter.
3Betty MacDonald to Joanie, JerJer, Heidi and Beckie [Joan Keil, Jerry Keil, Heidi Keil, and Rebecca Keil], April 8, 1953.
4Betty MacDonald to Joanie, JerJer, Heidi, and Timmy [Joan Keil, Jerry Keil, Heidi Keil, and Tim Keil], October 6, 1954.
5Betty and her secretaries used this form response to catch up her backlogged fan mail sometime around spring 1956.
6Betty’s letters express her amusement at her young grandchildren’s adenoidal rendering of Betty as Beddy.
7Betty MacDonald to Heidi, Becky, and Timmy [Heidi Keil, Rebecca Keil, and Tim Keil], May 5, 1955.
8Mary Bard Jensen to Dearest Ma Ma and Sissy and Donny and Mandy [Sydney Bard, Betty MacDonald, and Don MacDonald], n.d. Mandy was Betty’s dog.
9Although Don and Betty paid off their original mortgage on the Vashon property in the wake of Egg’s success, they remortgaged it in 1952.
10Betty MacDonald to Goddard Lieberson, December 18, 1956.
11Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, December 4, 1956.
12Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, March 21, 1957.
13Betty ultimately left only one story for this volume. In 2007, Betty’s daughter Anne Canham added an updated version of this story, “The Just-One-More-TV-Programmers,” to stories she’d written herself to create a new collection, Happy Birthday Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
14Betty MacDonald to Andy, Bobby, Johnny, Betsy, Darsie and Joanie and Margaret [Anne Evans, Bob Evans, Johnny Evans, Betsy Evans, Darsie Evans, Joanie Evans, and ?], April 8, 1957.
15Betty MacDonald to Joanie, JerJer, Heidi, Becky and Timmy [Joan Keil, Jerry Keil, Heidi Keil, Rebecca Keil, and Tim Keil], April 9, 1957.
16Mary Bard Jensen to Bernice Baumgarten, February 15, 1958, Baumgarten mss., Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
17Betty MacDonald to George Stevens, April 27, 1957.
18Betty MacDonald to Margaret, Kenneth, “Princess Margaret,” and Dave Beck [Margaret Bundy Callahan, Kenneth Callahan, ?, and ? It is highly unlikely that Betty was actually addressing the Seattle resident and West Coast Teamsters Union leader Dave Beck. She was almost certainly making a joke, although the meaning is now unclear. It is also possible that Princess Margaret and Dave Beck were pets], May 18, 1957.
19Betty MacDonald to Mary Bard Jensen, May 18, 1957.
20Betty MacDonald to Goddard Lieberson, August 22, 1957.
21Betty MacDonald to Bernice Baumgarten, August 22, 1957.
22Mary Bard Jensen to Bernice Baumgarten, February 15, 1958, Baumgarten mss., Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
23Don did not stay with Betty at Mary’s house but possibly with Anne and Bob Evans. Mary Bard Jensen to Bernice Baumgarten, February 15, 1958.
24M. Stephen Piver, “Treatment of Ovarian Cancer at the Crossroads: 50 Years after Single-Agent Melphalan Chemotherapy,” Oncology 20, no. 10 (September 2006): 1156–58.
25Callahan, Margaret Callahan, 400.
26Betty MacDonald to Tay Hohoff and Lynn [Carrick?], December 11, 1957.
27Hospitalization dates are from the Maynard Hospital’s creditor’s claim submitted to Betty MacDonald’s estate during probate, King County Superior Court Case #149165, PSRA.
28Mary Bard Jensen to Bernice Baumgarten, February 15, 1958.
29Newspapers reported that no funeral was held, but the Bonney-Watson Funeral Company’s bill to Betty MacDonald’s estate contains a line item for “professional services and supplies for funeral of Betty MacDonald as ordered by Donald C. MacDonald, husband of deceased,” as well as a charge for cremation. King County Superior Court Case #149165, PSRA.
30Royalties from Betty’s other books actually paid back the money owed before Who, Me? was published. The title is a reference to the title of chapter 3 of Egg: “Who, Me?” or “Look ‘Peasant,’ Please!”
31Tay Hohoff to Bernice Baumgarten, January 16, 1959, Baumgarten mss., Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
32Mary Bard Jensen to Bernice Baumgarten, February 15, 1958.
33Tay Hohoff to Bernice Baumgarten [Mrs. James Gould Cozzens], October 14, 1959, Baumgarten mss., Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
34After Bernice Baumgarten retired, she continued to work with a few clients, including Betty. Lilly Library materials document this period of Baumgarten’s work. Matthew Bruccoli, Cozzens’ biographer, was the author of numerous other biographies and had earlier been frustrated by his inability to access Baumgarten’s Brandt & Brandt correspondence with Raymond Chandler. Presented with the opportunity to safeguard Baumgarten materials, Bruccoli made sure it happened.
35J. B. Lippincott Company, The Author and His Audience (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1967), 19.
36Shirley Jackson’s nonfiction work on domestic themes might be included under the “funny women” rubric, but as her publications were roughly contemporary with Betty’s, Jackson cannot be said to have followed in her footsteps. If anything, Betty’s domestic focus in Onions could have been influenced stylistically by Jackson’s work. Beginning in about 1950, Jackson and Betty were both clients of Bernice Baumgarten.
37William Cumming, Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), 183.
EPILOGUE
1The Vashon Heritage Museum also houses a small collection of photocopies of Betty’s letters.
FURTHER READING
BOOKS BY BETTY MACDONALD
The Egg and I (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1945)
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1947)
The Plague and I (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1948)
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949)
Anybody Can Do Anything (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1950)
Nancy and Plum (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952)
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954)
Onions in the Stew (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955)
Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1957)
Who, Me? (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959)
Betty MacDonald and Anne MacDonald Canham, Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (New York: HarperCollins, 2007)
BOOKS BY MARY BARD
The Doctor Wears Three Faces (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949)
Forty Odd (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953)
Best Friends (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955)
Just Be Yourself (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1956)
Best Friends in Summer (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1960)
Best Friends at School (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961)
BOOKS BY OTHER MEMBERS OF THE BARD FAMILY
Darsie Beck, with Mari Jensen Clack, Salli Jensen Rogers, Heidi Jensen Rabel, Chris Goldsmith, Dottie Goldsmith, and Alison Beck, E. S. Bard: Drawings and Paintings (n.d. [ca. 2009]), private publication
Darsie Beck, Your Essential Nature: A Practical Guide to Greater Creativity and Spiritual Harmony, 2nd ed. (Vashon Island, WA: Waterworks Studio, 2011)
Heidi Rabel, The What to Fix for Dinner Cookbook (Seattle: Hara, 1995)
MEMOIRS BY BETTY’S FRIENDS
Blanche Caffiere, Much Laughter, a Few Tears: Memoirs of a Woman’s Friendship with Betty MacDonald and Her Family (Vashon, WA: Blue Gables, 1992)
Brian Tobey Callahan, ed., Margaret Callahan: Mother of Northwest Art (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2009)
William Cumming, Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984)
Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953)
HISTORY OF PORTLAND, OREGON
; Polk’s Portland, Oregon city directories (multiple years)
HISTORY OF BUTTE, MONTANA
John Astle, Only in Butte: Stories off the Hill (Butte, MT: Holt, 2004)
Ellen Crain and Lee Whitney, Images of America: Butte (Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009)
Patty Dean, ed., Drumlummon Views: Coming Home, a Special Issue Devoted to the Historic Built Environment and Landscapes of Butte and Anaconda, Montana (Helena, MT: Drumlummon Institute, 2009)
George Everett, Butte Trivia (Helena, MT: Riverbend, 2007)
Janet L. Finn, Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900–1960 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2012)
Richard I. Gibson, Lost Butte, Montana (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012)
Adolf H. Heilbronner, Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens, Butte’s Only Pleasure Resort (Butte, MT: Butte Miner, 1902)
Don James, Butte’s Memory Book (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1980)
John H. McIntosh, ed., Butte: Metropolis of Montana (Butte, MT: Chamber of Commerce, Merchants Association, Rotary Club of Butte, 1915)
Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–1941 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
Polk’s Butte, Montana, city directories (multiple years)
S. H. Soule, The Rand-McNally Guide to the Great Northwest (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1903)
Ruth Kedzie Woods, The Tourist’s Northwest (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917)
Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration in the State of Montana, Copper Camp (New York: Hastings House, 1943)
HISTORY OF BOULDER, COLORADO
Boulder telephone directories, 1906–8
Polk’s Boulder, Colorado, city directories (multiple years)
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON STATE
Christine Barrett, A History of Laurelhurst, rev. ed. (Seattle: Laurelhurst Community Club, 1981)
Thomas W. Camfield, Port Townsend: The City That Whiskey Built, vol. 2 (Port Townsend, WA: Ah Tom, 2002)
Roland Carey, Van Olinda’s History of Vashon-Maury Island (Seattle: Alderbrook, 1985)
Hector Escobosa, Here’s Seattle (Seattle: Frank McCaffrey, 1948)
Elisabeth Webb Herrick, Native Northwest Novelties: What to Look for besides Scenery (Seattle: Ivy, 1937)
HistoryLink.org, free online encyclopedia of Washington State history, www.HistoryLink.org
Lincoln High School Totem yearbook, 1921, 1922
Polk’s Seattle, Washington, city directories (multiple years)
Roosevelt High School Strenuous Life yearbook, 1923, 1924, 1932
Peter Simpson and James Hermanson, Port Townsend: Years That Are Gone (Port Townsend, WA: Quimper Press, 1979)
Nile Thompson and Carolyn J. Marr, Building for Learning: Seattle Public Schools Histories, 1862–2000 (Seattle: Seattle Public Schools, 2002)
Pat Thompson, ed., In and around Port Ludlow (Port Ludlow, WA: Olympic, 1987)
University of Washington Tyee yearbook, 1923, 1924, 1925
HISTORY OF CARMEL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Daisy Bostic, Carmel Today and Yesterday (Carmel, CA: Seven Valley Arts, 1945)
James Ladd Delkin, Monterey Peninsula, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Northern California Writers’ Project, 1946)
Sharon Lee Hale, A Tribute to Yesterday: The History of Carmel, Carmel Valley, Big Sur, Point Lobos, Carmelite Monastery, and Los Burros (Santa Cruz, CA: Valley Publishers, 1980)
FAMILY HISTORIES OF PROFESSIONAL MINING ENGINEERS
Anne Beiser Allen, An Independent Woman: The Life of Lou Henry Hoover (Greenwood, CT: Westport, 2000)
Christiane Fischer, ed. Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849–1900 (Hamden, CT: Shoe String, 1977)
Alice Gommersall Scott, “Westward Ho! With a Mining Engineer,” Journal of Arizona History 39, no. 2 (July 1998): 176–90
Josephine Hoeppner Woods, High Spots in the Andes Peruvian: Letters of a Mining Engineer’s Wife (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935)
SOCIAL HISTORY
Isabel Drummond, Getting a Divorce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931)
Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore, Gender and the Social Construction of Illness, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002)
Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte, 1978)
Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Jan Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002)
TUBERCULOSIS
Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)
Frederick G. Hamley, Firland (Seattle: Firland Occupational Therapy Department, n.d. [ca. 1937])
Barron H. Lerner, Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis along the Skid Road (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
Frank Ryan, The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle against Tuberculosis Was Won—and Lost (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992)
Isabel Smith, Wish I Might (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955)
Marian Spitzer, I Took It Lying Down (New York: Random House, 1951)
BOOKS ABOUT THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
John Bear, The #1 New York Times Best Seller (Berkeley: Ten Speed, 1992)
Matthew J. Bruccoli, James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983)
Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001)
J. Stuart Freeman Jr., Toward a Third Century of Excellence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1992)
Alice Payne Hackett, 70 Years of Best Sellers, 1895–1965 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1967)
Tay Hohoff, Cats and Other People (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973)
Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900–1999 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001)
J. B. Lippincott, The Author and His Audience (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1967)
Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966)
Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981)
BOOKS RELATING TO THE FILMING OF THE EGG AND I
Bernard F. Dick, Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008)
Clive Hirschhorn, The International Story (New York: Crown, 1983)
Richard Koszarski, Universal Pictures: 65 Years (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977)
Lawrence J. Quirk, Claudette Colbert: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Crown, 1985)
Charles Tranberg, Fred MacMurray: A Biography (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2007)
Michelle Vogel, Marjorie Main (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006)
BOOKS DISCUSSING THE ILLUSTRATORS OF BETTY’S BOOKS
Dilys Evans, Show and Tell: Exploring the Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2008)
Joyce Y. Hanrahan, Works of Maurice Sendak, Revised and Expanded to 2001 (New York: Custom Communications, 2001)
David F. Martin, The Art of Richard Bennett (Seattle: Museum of History and Industry, 2010)
DOMESTIC HUMOR AND BETTY’S CONTEMPORARIES
Martha Bensley Bruere and Mary Ritter Beard, Laughing Their Way: Women’s Humor in America (New York: MacMillan, 1934)
Penelope Fritzer and Bartholomew Bland, Merry Wives and Others: A History of Domestic Humor Writing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1949)
Barbara Levy, Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997)
Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988)
Nancy A. Wal
ker, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
RURAL HUMOR
Tim Hollis, Ain’t That A Knee-Slapper: Rural Humor in the Twentieth Century (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008)
PERIODICALS
Anaconda Standard
Boulder Daily Camera
Butte Miner
Carmel Pine Cone
Carmel Valley News
New York Times
Port Townsend Weekly Ledger
Publisher’s Weekly
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seattle Times
Town Crier (Seattle)
Digital newspaper collection, www.Ancestry.com
ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS
Bernice Baumgarten Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Richard Bennett collection, Museum of History and Industry, Seattle
Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, Butte, Montana
Margaret Bundy Callahan Papers, University of Washington Special Collections, Seattle, Washington
Carmel Valley Historical Society, Periodicals Collection, Carmel Valley
Department of Institutions, Firland Hospital, Washington State Archives, Olympia, Washington
Herbert Gowen Papers, University of Washington Special Collections, Seattle, Washington
Jefferson County Historical Society Oral History Project, Jefferson County Historical Society Research Center, Port Townsend, Washington
Jefferson County Superior Court Records and Jefferson County Civil Case Files, Eastern Branch of Washington State Archives, Bellingham, Washington
King County Superior Court Records and King County Civil Case Files, Puget Sound Branch of Washington State Archives, Bellevue, Washington
