Cean Dubh Deelish
by Sir Samuel Ferguson

Put your head, darling, darling, darling,
Your darling black head my heart above;
Oh, mouth of honey, with the thyme for fragrance,
Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?
Oh, many and many a young girl for me is pining,
Letting her locks of gold to the cold wind free,
For me, the foremost of our gay young fellows;
But I'd leave a hundred, pure love, for thee!
Then put your head, darling, darling, darling,
Your darling black head my heart above;
Oh, mouth of honey, with the thyme for fragrance,
Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?

"Cean Dubh Deelish" by Sir Samuel Ferguson. Public domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of playwright and screenwriter George Axelrod, (books by this author) born in New York City (1922). He's the author of The Seven Year Itch (1952) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), and he wrote the screenplays for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

It's the birthday of actor Johnny Depp, born in Owensboro, Kentucky (1963).

It was on this day in 1909 that the first woman to drive across the United States, Alice Huyler Ramsey, left New York City for San Francisco. She was 22 years old, a housewife from Hackensack, New Jersey. Her trip got a lot of media attention. In 1909, not many women drove cars, and some doctors thought that it was dangerous for women to even ride in cars because they would get too worked up at more than 20 miles an hour. Alice Huyler Ramsey drove 3,800 miles across the country in a Maxwell 30 with three other women, but she was the only one who knew how to drive. They drove for 41 days and used 11 spare tires. She wrote a book about the trip called Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron (1961). In 2000, she was the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

It's the birthday of the man who wrote the lines:

The girls today in society
Go for classical poetry
So to win their hearts one must quote (with ease)
Aeschylus and Euripides. …
But the poet of them all
Who will start 'em simply ravin'
Is the poet people call
The bard of Stratford-on-Avon!
Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.

Cole Porter (works by this musician), born in Peru, Indiana, in 1891. He went to Yale University, where he got horrible grades but wrote and performed more than 300 songs for school shows. He went off to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, where he lived for most of the 1920s. In 1928, he wrote his first big hit, "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love," which begins, "Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it." After that his career took off, and he ended up writing hundreds of songs for movies, television, and Broadway shows.

It's the birthday of novelist Charles Webb, (books by this author) born in San Francisco, California, 1939. He wrote a book that became one of the iconic films of the 1960s: The Graduate (1963; film version, 1967). Not many people realize that The Graduate is based on a book, but in fact the dialogue in the film comes almost entirely from the novel.

Webb grew up in Pasadena, California, and he turned down an inheritance from his father who was a wealthy doctor. He wrote The Graduate in the poolside bar of the Pasadena Huntington Hotel, and he based it loosely on his own experience: He was attracted to the wife of a friend of his parents, and he decided "it might be better to write about it than to do it." When The Graduate was published, he was 24 years old.

It was on this day in 1860, 160 years ago, that the first "dime novel" was published: Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens (books by this author). Most dime novels were filled with crime, violence, and romance, and could be read very quickly.

In 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe (books by this author) wrote to Louisa May Alcott: (books by this author) "In my many fears for my country and in these days when so much seductive and dangerous literature is pushed forward, the success of your domestic works has been to me most comforting." She was referring, of course, to Little Women and its sequels; but in fact, Alcott preferred writing potboilers, and thought that Little Women was boring.

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

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