Amo, Amas
by John O'Keefe

Amo, Amas, I love a lass
As a cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip's grace is her nominative case,
And she's of the feminine gender.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Can I decline a Nymph divine?
Her voice as a flute is dulcis.
Her oculus bright, her manus white,
And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Oh, how bella my puella,
I'll kiss secula seculorum.
If I've luck, sir, she's my uxor,
O dies benedictorum.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.


"Amo, Amas" by John O'Keefe. Public domain.

On this day in 1974, the first Universal Product Code was scanned at a supermarket cash register. The first scan was made at a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, which had agreed to serve as a test facility for the new technology, and the first item scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum. There’s no significance to gum being the first item scanned--it just happened to be the first thing pulled from the cart. That pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The UPC bar code system was originally invented specifically for grocery stores, to speed checkout and help them keep better track of their inventory, but it proved so successful that it spread quickly to other retailers. The first patent for a bar code went to N. Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952. They didn’t do anything with it for 20 years, because the scanning technology didn’t exist yet. By 1972 Woodland was working for IBM and it was there that the bar code design was perfected and the prototype scanner was built in 1973. The IBM 3660 included a digital cash register and checkout scanner, and the grocery industry, which had been collaborating with IBM on the invention, began requiring its suppliers to start putting bar codes on their packaging.

It was on this day in 1997 that the first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in Britain. Joanne (JK) Rowling (books by this author) was an unemployed, single mother waiting for a delayed train, when an idea suddenly came to her. “I did not have a functioning pen with me,” she said. “I simply sat and thought for four hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me ... I began to write that very evening.”

It's the birthday of the blues musician Big Bill Broonzy, born in Scott, Mississippi (although some sources say Lake Dick, Arkansas), in 1898 (some sources say 1893), one of 17 children of parents born into slavery. When he was a young boy, his uncle made him a fiddle from a cigar box and taught him how to play. He moved to Chicago and started playing fiddle tunes, which did not appeal to sophisticated Chicago audiences. So he learned to play the guitar and sing the blues. It took him several years to get the hang of it, but he began making recordings in 1927 and soon became one of the most popular blues singers in the country. He sang at Carnegie Hall in 1939, but by the late 1940s, the blues began to change with Muddy Waters' electric guitar sound and style. By 1950 Broonzy was working as a janitor at Iowa State University when Studs Terkel "rediscovered" him and had him on his radio program as a frequent guest.

In the early '50s he toured Europe and England where his records were best-sellers, and Eric Clapton later credited Broonzy as one of his first influences.

It's the birthday of writer Pearl S. Buck (books by this author), born in Hillsboro, West Virginia (1892). Her parents were Christian missionaries, and she was raised in China from the age of three months. She said: "I spoke Chinese first, and more easily. [...] I did not consider myself a white person in those days." She was tutored in the mornings by her mother, but spent the afternoons with her beloved Chinese nurse, who told her stories and took her to visit friends, where young Pearl listened to women gossip. She played with Chinese friends, joined their parties, and hid her blond hair underneath a hat.

She married an agricultural missionary. They lived in northern China and then Nanking, where she taught English literature. In 1920, she gave birth to a daughter, Carol, who had a severe developmental disability. Her husband did not know how to cope with Carol and withdrew from his family. At times Buck doted on Carol, desperately hoping that her condition would improve. And other times she was frustrated and embarrassed by the girl, who would scream and cry for hours on end. She said, "Sometimes I can scarcely bear to look at other children and see what she might have become."

By the winter of 1927-28 Buck was living in Shanghai and she was unhappy. Earlier that year they had been forced to evacuate their home in Nanking after a violent skirmish called the Nanking Incident — among those targeted were white foreigners, and their home was destroyed. She had just completed the manuscript of her first novel, working in her own private space in the attic, but the only copy was destroyed by looters. The Red Cross sent them to Japan with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and they lived there for seven months before moving to Shanghai. Her husband returned to Nanking for work so she was left caring for the children, sharing a run-down rental house in Shanghai with two other families. Her marriage was deteriorating. Her salary was tiny, and her husband forced her to sign it over to him and then ask for an allowance. She knew that the only hope of giving Carol long-term care was in the United States, but her husband didn't want to leave China. She realized that she might end up responsible for Carol and that she had to figure out a way to provide for her.

So she returned to writing, not out of passion, but as a way to earn money. She had written a few stories here and there, and the novel that had been destroyed, and she felt it was her best chance of earning a living. She found an old trade magazine in a Shanghai bookstore and it listed three literary agents, so she wrote to all three. Two of them told her there was no market in America for Chinese subjects. The third, David Lloyd, agreed to take her on, and remained her agent for 30 years.

In 1929, Buck took Carol back to America to find her long-term care. Touring institutions depressed her, and although she found a place she liked, she said that leaving Carol was the hardest thing she did in her life. She took out a loan from a member of the Mission Board to afford the care. At the same time her first novel, East Wind, West Wind (1930), was accepted for publication by John Day Company. Her agent had sent it to 25 publishers, and John Day was the last on his list; if they refused it, he was going to withdraw the manuscript. John Day's president and publisher, Richard Walsh, later became Buck's lover, and eventually her husband. She started writing her second novel,The Good Earth (1931), as soon as she got back to China, and it took her just three months. Buck was floored when it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and she was sent a check for $4,000 — with that money she could pay for several years of Carol's schooling. The Good Earth sold nearly 2 million copies in its first year of publication, and was the best-selling book of 1931 and 1932. She earned more than $100,000 dollars in a year and a half, and put $40,000 toward Carol's care. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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