Running After My Mother
by Connie Wanek

We'd gone downtown to the sidewalk sales
that hot August, and my mother made it
her children's job to keep up. She strode forth
toward the dollar racks at Prange' s
with the concentration of a snake wrestler.
She needed both her hands for this work,
and there were four of us, so we were utterly
untied, like broken shoe strings.
We chased her. We ran. And one of us
fell in the stampede.
                                    Children were cheaply
acquired those days, and provisions dear.
Spankings were cathartic.
Striking small bodies was Catholic.
Strange how fast we could run,
stumble, and rise again
when so much was at stake.

“Running After My Mother” by Connie Wanek. © 2020 by Connie Wanek. Reprinted with permission of the author. (books by this author)

It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos (books by this author), born in Mount Shasta, California (1889). Her father managed a theater, and Loos began acting there as a small child. Eventually, she became so popular that she was the family’s main source of income. Her first screenplay was produced by D.W. Griffith when she was just 23 years old — The New York Hat (1912). Between 1913 and 1928, she wrote about 150 screenplays for silent films, and almost two-thirds of them were made into movies, many of them starring the biggest stars of the day.

In 1925, Loos published the fictionalized diary of a naive, flighty young woman named Lorelei Lee in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. The next year, the diary was published in book form with the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), and Loos became an instant celebrity. In one diary entry, Lorelei Lee writes, “I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good, but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes went on to become a hit Broadway musical starring Carol Channing, and a Hollywood movie starring Marilyn Monroe.

Late in her life, Loos wrote three volumes of her memoirs: A Girl Like I (1966), Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974), and Cast of Thousands (1977).

Anita Loos said: “The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.”

It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open”: Ludwig Wittgenstein (books by this author), born in Vienna in 1889. He was described by his colleague Bertrand Russell as “the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived: passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” He was the youngest of nine children; three of his brothers committed suicide.

Wittgenstein was born into one of the richest families in Austro-Hungary, but he later gave away his inheritance to his siblings, and also to an assortment of Austrian writers and artists, including Rainer Maria Rilke. He once said that the study of philosophy rescued him from nine years of loneliness and wanting to die, yet he tried to leave philosophy several times and pursue another line of work, including serving in the army during World War I, working as a porter at a London hospital and teaching elementary school. He also considered careers in psychiatry and architecture — going so far as to design and build a house for his sister, which she never liked very much.

Wittgenstein was particularly interested in language. He wrote: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”

Today is the birthday of the man who once wrote, “I feel I am strange to all but the birds of America”: ornithologist and artist John James Audubon (books by this author), born in Les Cayes in what is now Haiti (1785). Audubon grew up in France, and when he was 18 years old, his father managed to get him a false passport to escape the Napoleonic Wars, and he headed to America. Fascinated by all the new American birds he saw, he began to study them more closely. He found some Eastern Phoebes nesting in a cave. He had read that they returned to the same spot to nest every year, and he wanted to test that idea. For days, he sat in the cave with them and read a book, until they were used to him and let him approach. He tied string to their legs to identify them, and sure enough, the next year the same birds were back in the cave. It is the first known incident of banding birds.

Audubon fell in love with a woman named Lucy Bakewell. Her father objected to Audubon’s lack of career goals and insisted that he find a solid trade before marriage. So, he opened a general store in Kentucky on the Ohio River, and soon after, John and Lucy were married. Audubon was a terrible business owner, and eventually he realized that his best chance for success lay in his birds after all. Lucy took on the main breadwinner duties by teaching children in their home, while her husband traveled all over the continent collecting specimens for his masterpiece, Birds of America (1838). The book was two feet wide and three feet tall, with 435 life-sized hand-colored plates of birds. It was extraordinarily expensive to print, and was financed by advance orders as well as commissioned paintings, exhibitions, and any furs that Audubon was able to trap and sell on his excursions. But it was a success. One reviewer wrote: “All anxieties and fears which overshadowed his work in its beginning had passed away. The prophecies of kind but overprudent friends, who did not understand his self-sustaining energy, had proved untrue; the malicious hope of his enemies, for even the gentle lover of nature has enemies, had been disappointed; he had secured a commanding place in the respect and gratitude of men.”

It’s the birthday of architect and writer Frederick Law Olmsted, born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822. He is known as the founder of American landscape architecture and designed New York’s Central Park. Though Olmsted is most famous for landscape architecture, that’s only one of his accomplishments. He worked as a journalist and wrote several books on various subjects, including two on slavery and Southern society. He was a managing editor of Putnam’s Magazine and was also a partner in the publishing firm of Dix and Edwards. He drained the saltwater and sewage from Boston’s Back Bay and created the Fenway. He managed a gold-mining estate in California. He was the administrative head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which was the forerunner to the American Red Cross and helped meet the needs of Union soldiers during the Civil War. He was a leader in the conservation movement, helping to preserve the Yosemite Valley and Niagara Falls.

His friend and colleague Daniel Burnham once said of Olmsted: “An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views.”

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

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