“A work of real comic genius. . . . A wonderful, funny, warm, honest book, and, to use a much overused word, a classic.” –Michael Korda, author of Country Matters
When Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild. With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. And then came the children. Yet through every trial and pitfall—through chaos and catastrophe—this indomitable family somehow, mercifully, never lost its sense of humor.
A beloved literary treasure for more than half a century, Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is a heartwarming and uproarious account of adventure and survival on an American frontier.
PART ONE
Such Duty
Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband. --SHAKESPEARE
1
And I’ll Be Happy
ALONG with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife’s bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work. “First make sure that your husband is doing the kind of work he enjoys and is best fitted for and then cheerfully accept whatever it entails. If you marry a doctor, don’t whine because he doesn’t keep the hours of a shoe clerk, and by the same token if you marry a shoe clerk, don’t complain because he doesn’t make as much money as a doctor. Be satisfied that he works regular hours,” Mother told us.
According to Mother, if your husband wants to give up the banking business and polish agates for a living, let him. Help him with his agate polishing. Learn to know and to love agates (and incidentally to eat them).
“It is depressing enough for a man to know that he has to work the rest of his life without the added burden of knowing that it will be work he hates. Too many potentially great men are eating their hearts out in dull jobs because of selfish wives.” And Mother had examples too. There was the Fuller Brush man who came to our house once a month and told Mother how deliriously happy he used to be raising Siberian wolves and playing the violin with a symphony orchestra until he ran afoul of and married Myrtle. The man in the A & P vegetable department who was lilting through life as a veterinary surgeon until he married a woman who hated animals but loved vegetables. And the numerous mining men Mother and Daddy knew who were held down to uninspiring company jobs by wives who wouldn’t face the financial insecurity of their husbands going into business for themselves.
“Boy,” we said, “when we get married, our husbands will do exactly as they please,” and they have.
This I’ll-go-where-you-go-do-what-you-do-be-what-you-are-and-I’ll-be-happy philosophy worked out splendidly for Mother for she followed my mining engineer father all over the United States and led a fascinating life; but not so well for me, because although I did what she told me and let Bob choose the work in which he felt he would be happiest and then plunged wholeheartedly in with him, I wound up on the Pacific Coast in the most untamed corner of the United States, with a ten-gallon keg of good whiskey, some very dirty Indians, and hundreds and hundreds of most uninteresting chickens.
Something was wrong. Either Mother skipped a chapter or there was some great lack in me, because Bob was happy in his work but I was not. I couldn’t learn to love or to know chickens or Indians and, instead of enjoying living in that vast wilderness, I kept thinking: Who am I against two and a half million acres of mountains and trees? Perhaps Mother with her flair for pioneering would have enjoyed it. Perhaps.
Where Mother got this pioneer spirit, how she came by it, I do not know, for a thorough search of the family records reveals no Daniel Boones, no wagon trains heading West with brave women slapping at Indians with their sunbonnets. In fact, our family tree appears rife with lethargy, which no doubt accounts for our all living to be eighty-seven or ninety-three.
Mother’s ancestors were Dutch. Ten Eyck was their name and they settled in New York in 1613. One of my father’s family names was Campbell. The Campbells came to Virginia from Scotland. They were all nice well-bred people but not daring or adventuresome except for “Gammy,” my father’s mother, who wore her corsets upside down and her shoes on the wrong feet and married a gambler with yellow eyes. The gambler, James Bard of Bardstown, Kentucky, took his wife out West, played Faro with his money, his wife’s money and even some of his company’s money and then tactfully disappeared and was always spoken of as dead.
We never saw this grandfather but he influenced our lives whether he knew it or not, because Gammy was a strong believer in heredity, particularly the inheritance of bad traits, and she watched us like hawks when we were children to see if the “taint” was coming out in any of us. She hammered on my father to such an extent about his gambling blood that he would not allow us children to play cards in any form, not even Slap Jack or Old Maid, and though Mother finally forced him to learn to play double Canfield, he died without ever having played a hand of bridge, a feat which I envy heartily.
The monotony of Mother’s family was not relieved in any way until she married Darsie Bard who was her brother’s tutor and a Westerner working his way through Harvard. This was a very shocking incident as Mother’s family believed that the confines of civilization ended with the boundaries of New York State and that Westerners were a lot of very vulgar people who pronounced their r’s and thought they were as good as anybody. Mother’s mother, whom later we were forced to call Deargrandmother, had fainting fits, spells and tantrums but to no avail. Mother went flipping off without a backward glance, to live, for Heaven’s sake, in Butte, Montana.
This was Butte in the early 1900’s. The time of the Copper Kings, when everyone made a million dollars, there were thirty-five thousand miners working underground and a saloon every other doorway. Irish scrubwomen became the wives of millionaires and had interior decorators come from France to “do” their houses. Lawns were imported blade by blade and given the care of orchids in order to make them grow in that sulphur-laden air. Oriental rugs were a sign of wealth and grandeur and were put on the floors three deep and piled in heaps in attics. Southern mansions, French chateaus, Welsh stone cottages, timbered English houses, Swiss chalets and American bungalows were built to house the rich Irish. Everyone was cordial, bluff and gay and entertained lavishly and all the time. A party was given at the Silver Bow Club to welcome Mother to Butte and she was amazed to find that the ladies of the town wore Paris gowns but painted their faces like prostitutes. Mother had been reared to believe that if you were unfortunate enough to be born with a pale green face, you, if you were a lady, would not for a moment entertain the thought of rouge, but would accept your color as your cross and do nice things for poor people. Mother had been reared this way but she didn’t endorse such nonsense. Fortunately she had natural colors so she wasn’t put to any test, but she was certainly pleased to find that the ladies of Butte, and there were many ladies in the strictest sense of the word, had kicked over the traces from Boston to Atlanta and were improving on nature with everything they could lay hand to. Mother loved the West and she loved Westerners.
My sister Mary was born in Butte. She had red hair and to appease Mother’s family was given the middle name of Ten Eyck which necessitated her fighting her way through grammar school to the taunts of Mary Tin Neck.
When Mary was less than a year old my father was sent down to the Nevada desert to examine gold property. Mother joyfully went with him and lived in a shack and rode horseback with the baby on the saddle in front of her. Both Mother and Daddy were happy in his work.
I was born in Boulder, Colorado. Gammy was with us then and the night I was born, when Mother began having pains, she called to Gammy (Daddy was away on a mining trip) and told her to phone for the doctor and nurse. But Gammy, prompted by the same inner urge which made her wear her corsets upside down, rushed across the street and pounded on the door of a veterinary and when he appeared, she dragged him bewildered and in his long underwear to Mother’s bedside. Mother, very calm, sent the poor man home, but because of the delay and confusion I was born before the doctor could get there and it was necessary for Gammy to tie and cut the umbilical cord. This was very unfortunate, as Gammy, a Southern girl, had been “delicately reared” and her knowledge of rudimentary anatomy could have been put in the eye of a needle. She thought the cord had to be tied into a knot and so grabbing me like the frayed end of a rope, she began looping me through and under as she attempted the knot. The upshot was that Mother sat up and tied and cut the cord herself and I was named for Gammy and became another in a long line of Anne Elizabeth Campbells. My hair was snow white but later turned red.
When I was a few months old Mother received the following wire from Daddy: “Leaving for Mexico City for two years Thursday—be ready if you want to come along.” This was Monday. Mother wired: “Will be ready” and she was; and Thursday morning, we all, including Gammy, left for Mexico.
Díaz was serving his last term as president of Mexico then, and Mexico City was a delightful place of Mexicans, flowers and beautiful horses. My sister, Mary, because of her brilliant red hair, was much admired by the Mexicans and learned to speak fluent Spanish, but I, an outstanding dullard, didn’t even begin to speak anything until almost three. There was a series of violent earthquakes while we were in Mexico but Mother, never one to become hysterical, inquired as to earthquake procedure, and when the lamps began to describe arcs in the air, the mirrors to sway and the walls to buckle, Mother sensibly herded Mary, Gammy and me into the doorway of the apartment, where the building structure was supposed to be strongest and, though the apartment building was cracked from top to bottom, we were all unharmed. A woman in the next apartment became very excited and rushed into the street in her nightgown, where, I am happy to relate, a water main burst directly under her.
From Mexico we moved to Placerville, Idaho, a mining camp in the mountains near Boise, where the snow was fifteen feet deep on the level in winter and Mother bought a year’s supply of food at a time. Our closest neighbor was a kind woman who had been a very successful prostitute in Alaska and wore a chain of large gold nuggets which reached below her knees. She was very fond of me, Mother says, and told everyone, to Gammy’s intense annoyance, that I was the “spitting image” of her when she was three years old. In Placerville, Mrs. Wooster (I believe that this was her name) had become a respectable married woman but evidently this palled, for Mother says she talked constantly of the “good old days.” I can feel for her because, although I have never been an Alaskan prostitute dancing on the bar in a spangled dress, I still got very bored with washing and ironing and dishwashing and cooking day after relentless day. Of course Mrs. Wooster had an extra hurdle in her path of boredom, that of the same old husband jumping into bed every night.
In Placerville, my father supervised his first large placer mining project and as the work was both dangerous and hard, Mother tore the partitions out of the crackerbox house, built a fireplace and bore my brother Sydney Cleveland, all by herself. Cleveland had red hair. All this red hair caused a lot of comment in Placerville, as Mother was a blonde with brown eyes and Daddy had jet black hair and gray eyes. What no one knew was that Daddy had a bright red beard if he let it grow. When Cleve was born Mother’s father wired her, “I trust you won’t feel called upon to have a child in every state in the Union.”
Our next jaunt was East to visit Mother’s mother or Deargrandmother. The moment we arrived, we children were stuffed into a nursery with an adenoidal nurse named Phyllis, and at my five-year-old birthday party the children were instructed by Deargrandmother not to bring presents. My, how we longed for Gammy with her shoes on the wrong feet and her easy friendly ways. Deargrandmother was noted for her beautiful figure and proud carriage but she toed out and had trouble with her arches. She taught Mary and me to turn our toes out when we walked, say “Very well, thank you” instead of “Fine” when people inquired of our health, and to curtsy when we said “How do you do?” She tried hard to scrape the West off these little nuggets, but as soon as we returned home Daddy made us walk like Indians again, feet pointed straight ahead. I would like to remark here and now, that this walking with feet pointed straight ahead is the only thing about an Indian which I would care to imitate.
When we returned from Auburn, we moved to Butte and lived there for the next four years.
Of Butte I remember long underwear which Gammy called “chimaloons” for some strange reason of her own. We folded our “chimaloons” carefully at the ankles so as not to wrinkle our white stockings. I remember my new Lightning Glider sled and coasting fourteen blocks downhill on Montana Street and hitching a ride all the way back. I remember icicles as big as our legs hanging outside the windows, and bobsledding at night with Daddy, who invariably tipped the sled over and took us home bawling. Creamed codfish and baked potatoes for breakfast and hot soup with grease bubbles which Gammy called “eyes” in it for lunch. Walking to the post office with Daddy on Sunday night and holding bags of popcorn in our clumsy mittened hands and drinking the hot buttery popcorn out of the bag. The Christmas when we had scarlet fever and the thermometer went down and stuck in the bulb and we got wonderful presents which had to be burned. Creaking down the street through the dry snow to dancing school, our black patent leather slippers in a flowered bag, our breath white in front of us. A frozen cheek that Mother thawed with snow. A wonderful sleighride into the mountains at night with the bells sounding like tinkling glass, the runners hissing softly and our eyes peering from heaps of robes.
When Cleve and I used to “rassle” to see who would get the biggest apple, the most candy, or any of the other senseless things children quarrel about, Gammy would stand over us and shout, “Get the hatchet, Cleve, and kill her now. You’ll do it some day, so why not now.” This infuriated us so that we would cease pounding each other and become bosom friends just to “show” Gammy. Perhaps this was her underlying motive but it used to seem to me that she was far too anxious to get rid of her little namesake.
My sister Darsie was born when I was in the second grade. She was small and had dark hair. Also in the second grade a little boy named Waldo wet his panties while we were standing in the front of the class for reading and I got so red in the face that the teacher, a horrid creature who said “wite” for white and “tred” for thread, blamed me and felt my panties, to see if they were dry, in front of the whole class.
Mary and I wore white stockings to school every day and shoes with patent leather bottoms and white kid tops. Mary turned her stockings wrong side out and wore them two days which would have been all right but she told everybody and I was ashamed. Gammy made us wear aprons which she called “aperns” over our dresses while we were playing after school. She would greet us at the door with the “aperns” but if we managed to sneak out without them she would stand on the porch and call in a high mournful wail, “Giiiiiiiiirls, come get your ‘aperns’” (this last a high banshee shriek). After school, if the weather was nice, we played on the Montana School of Mines dump and found lots of the little clay retort cups in which gold had been assayed.
When we said bad words, which we did as fast as we learned them, and Gammy or Mother learned of it, we were given “heart medicine.” This was a dark vile-tasting liquid which while shriveling our tongues was supposed to be purifying our hearts. I learned later that it was bitter cascara and no doubt served a double purpose. We could not understand why our “hired girls,” who said God and Jesus all the time, were never given “heart medicine” while we innocent little children used up about a bottle a week.
Our “hired girls” were hot tempered Irish girls who hated children, especially children with red hair, and smacked us and threatened to quit if we came into the kitchen. They showed surprising weaknesses, however, like the Mary whom Mother found one frosty morning weeping into the hotcake batter. “What is the matter?” Mother asked, thinking it was probably a man. “Jesus-God, Mrs. Bard, I can’t get the damned things round,” and she tearfully pointed out a heap of oblong and oval hotcakes she had thrown into the sink.
Butte had no budding trees, no spring flowers and no green grass, but we knew when spring came by the raging torrents that ran in the gutters. In one such torrent I found a five-dollar bill. I thought it was a shoe coupon—I was collecting them—and carefully scooped it out with the toe of my rubber and took it home to Gammy, who ironed it dry and told me that it was five dollars. This was the first paper money I had ever seen, as silver and gold were used exclusively in Butte, and I didn’t really feel that I had found five dollars until Daddy exchanged it for a gold piece which I put in my copper bank with the picture of the Anaconda Smelter on the front of it. Later Cleve and I hacked this little bank open with a mining pick and spent the five-dollar gold piece on penny candy.
In the spring Gammy took us for walks in the hills and we were careful not to fall in “prospect holes” which suddenly appeared at our feet, black, scary and bottomless. Gammy told us stories of heedless children who scampered off into the hills to play but never came back and years and years later their little white skeletons were found in “prospect holes.” We gathered bluebells and bitterroot daisies and wild garlic. The bluebells were a deep clear blue like fallen sky against the bare black rocks. The bitterroot daisies, the Montana State flower, had little foliage and no stems and lay flat and pink and exquisite on the brown hard earth. We painstakingly dug them up, careful of the roots, carried them home and planted them and they immediately died as all the topsoil of Butte was washed away years before in the placer mining days, and our yard was nothing but decomposed granite. We had one patch of grass in our front yard about the size of a pocket handkerchief. I played there with my dolls, but was very careful not to sit on the grass or injure it in any way, (What would a life-long resident of Butte think if he could have seen the country surrounding our chicken ranch—where fenceposts sprouted, vines crept into the house and everything was so green, green, green, it made me feel bilious?)
One winter in Butte, we were taken to see a play at the Broadway Theatre. The play was The Bird of Paradise and we all clung to Gammy’s hands and bawled when the beautiful heroine threw herself into the erupting volcano. The next spring we climbed Big Butte, a bare, brown mountain, a thousand feet high and almost in our backyard and were horrified on reaching the top to find a large crater and to have Gammy explain casually that this mountain, the very one on which we lay panting, was a volcano. We ran every inch of the way home, peering back over our shoulders expecting to see the top of poor old Big Butte a fiery furnace with white hot lava oozing down its sides. We never would go up there again and when the sulphur smoke hung low over the city, veiling the top of Big Butte, we were sure it was erupting.
The sulphur smoke smelled awful but Gammy made us breathe deep and suck it down inside of us. She said it disinfected our insides. She also made us drink gallons of vile-tasting water at White Sulphur Springs. Between the “heart medicine” and the sulphur water and smoke we should have been as pure as angels, but unfortunately this was not the case, for we worked diligently to find out where babies came from, until one fateful day when my sister, Mary, proclaimed to the assembled neighborhood children, from a little platform we had erected in the backyard, “Ladies and Gentlemen, babies are born out of people’s stomach holes.” I can still taste the heart medicine.
Gammy used to walk us downtown but as she made us close our eyes every time we passed a saloon the walks were valuable to us more for the fresh air than for the sights we saw. Once she had us open our eyes to see a hat in Hennessy’s store window which cost $105. We could not get over it. One hundred and five dollars for a hat! We made three trips to see that hat but I haven’t the faintest recollection of what it looked like, no doubt because I kept my eyes glued to the price mark. We had heard from Mother that Hennessy’s, the company store, also sold Paris gowns but they didn’t put these in the window so we never saw one.
Often cowboys in chaps and ten-gallon hats rode cayuses down Main Street and several times Indian braves on ponies, followed by squaws on foot with papooses on their backs, filed slowly past the one-hundred-and-five-dollar hat window. These were the Blackfeet Indians and they wore beautifully beaded dresses and chaps and terrific feather headdresses, and had long noses and cold Indian eyes. As Gammy had read us the stories of Hiawatha, Pocahontas and Sitting Bull and told us many hair-raising tales of massacres, scalpings and running the gantlet, we thought these Indians were simply wonderful, so strong and brave, and would run for blocks to see them. I still harbored these romantic notions about Indians when I moved to the chicken ranch, and it was a bitter blow when I learned that today’s little red brother, or at least the Pacific Coast variety which I saw, is not a tall copper-colored brave, who, clad only in beads and feathers and brandishing a bow and arrow, bounds around in the deep woods. Instead, our Indian, squat and mud-colored, was more apt to be found slouched in a Model T, a toothpick clenched between his yellow teeth, a drunken leer on his flat face. On the reservation he was orderly and well behaved and, we were told, used to engage in dangerous pursuits like whaling and seal hunting; but in appearance, at any rate, he resembled the story-book variety and my childhood Blackfeet Indian, about as much as a mud shark resembles a Beardsley trout.
Our summers were spent camping in the mountains. Usually we had a camp man and slept in tents and followed Daddy about while he examined mines, but other times we had cabins on a lake and stayed with Gammy while Mother and Daddy did the travelling. My still-smoldering hatred for and distrust of wild animals were implanted on these camping trips. Once we almost fell on a large bear, placidly eating huckleberries on the other side of a log. Another time Daddy pointed out a mountain lion lying in the sun on a ledge above our heads. Bears were always knocking down our tents and eating our supplies and at night the coyotes and timber wolves howled dismally.
Mother and Daddy fished incessantly and we had Rainbow trout, which we children loathed, three times a day. Sometimes Gammy came camping with us but only when we had cabins and didn’t spend our days “traipsing” through the mountains. Gammy stayed with us while Mother and Daddy took trips and fished and although they were considerate and always asked if we cared to come along, we always refused because Mother and Daddy loved danger and were always walking logs over deep terrible ravines; walking into black dangerous mine tunnels; wading into swift turbulent streams and doing other scary things. Gammy, on the other hand, carefully avoided danger and was constantly on the alert for it.
Summer days with Gammy were spent in her cabin with the doors and windows shut tight against the dangers of mountain air. We would all crouch around her rocking chair while she read to us out of Pilgrim’s Progress and fed us licorice drops out of her black bag. This routine was varied occasionally by a thunderstorm, whose first clap of thunder sent us hurtling under the bed clutching feather pillows and praying, or by very short walks during which Gammy called us all to a halt every few feet to listen for rattlesnakes. She had us whipped into a state where the rattle of a leaf would turn us white and sweatyand send us scurrying home to the safety of the cabin. Gammy impressed us with all of the dangers of outdoor living. She warned us against eagles, hawks, bees, flies—horseflies which bit—mosquitoes and gnats which might attack from the air; ticks, snakes, leeches, and bugs which might spring snarling from the ground; and she had us convinced that the trees along the edge of the clearing where our cabins were, were like the bars of the cages at the zoo and just behind them prowled hundreds of timber wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions fighting for a chance to eat us.
From the summers we spent with Mother and Daddy camping in tents, we returned to town brown and healthy, but from the summers spent with Gammy, we came back as jumpy as fleas and pale and scraggly from the hours of lying on feather pillows under the beds praying during the thunderstorms and the days crowded in the close cabins out of the reach of groping fangs. We, of course, never told brave, fearless Mother and Daddy about Gammy and the dangers of outdoor life, and they probably wondered why they, so strong and daring, should have produced this group of high-tensioned rabbits.
When Mother and Daddy went away from home on long trips, which they did frequently, we stayed at home with Gammy. She had us all sleep in her room on army cots and folding beds which she hastily and carelessly erected and which were always collapsing and giving us skinned noses and black eyes. Gammy kept a pair of Daddy’s shoes beside her bed and when she heard any noise in the house she leaned out of bed and stamped the shoes on the floor so that the robber or killer, whichever one happened to be downstairs, would think that there was a man in the house instead of “a lone helpless woman and several small children” all huddled upstairs waiting to be killed.
Our “hired girls” often came in late and I’ve wondered since if this stamping of manly feet upstairs in the dead of night, when they knew that Mother and Daddy were in New York or Alaska, didn’t lead them to believe that Gammy had a secret love life. To the casual eyes of a maid this idea might have been plausible, as Gammy was a very pretty woman, small with large blue eyes, delicate regular features and tinselly curly hair. But to those of us who knew her there were several good reasons why this wouldn’t, couldn’t be. In the first place Gammy hated men—all men, except Daddy. “Just like some big stinkin’ Man,” she would sneer as she lapped up the account of a rape or murder in the paper. Or, “The whole world’s run for Men and don’t you forget it,” she would warn us as she inspected us to see if our eyes were shut before marching us past the Silver Dollar Saloon. Or, when we were having mining men, friends of Daddy’s, to dinner, which we did six nights a week, Gammy would caution the hired girl, “Don’t make it so awful good. Men’ll eat anything. The pigs!”
In the second place, any lover of Gammy’s would have had to equip himself with enduring desire and a bowie knife, for Gammy was well covered. She thought nakedness was a sin and warned us, “Don’t let me catch you running around in your naked strip!” and for her own part, she merely added or removed layers of clothing as the weather demanded. On top she always had a clean, ruffly white “apern”—during the day this was covered by a large checked “apern.” Under the aprons were a black silk dress, a black wool skirt, a white batiste blouse with a high collar, any number of flannel petticoats, a corset cover, the upside-down corset with the bust part fitting snugly over the hips, and at long last the “chimaloons.”
In the third place, a lover of Gammy’s certainly would have had a lumpy couch with her nightgowns, bed jackets and several extra suits of “chimaloons” folded under the pillow, her Bible tucked under the sheet at the top right-hand side, any book she happened to be reading tucked under the sheet on the other side, little bags of candy, an apple or two, current magazines, numerous sachets and her bottle of camphor just tucked under the blankets or scattered under the pillows within easy reach. We children thought this an ideal arrangement, for when we were lonely or frightened Gammy’s bed was as comforting as a crowded country store.
Gammy was an inexhaustible reader-aloud and took us through the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Dickens, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Kipling, The Little Colonel, The Wizard of Oz, The Five Little Peppers, and all of Zane Grey, which we adored, before we left Butte. She changed long words to ones we could understand without faltering, but after an hour or two with The Little Colonel or The Five Little Peppers she would begin to doze and we would be dispatched to the kitchen to ask Mary the Cook for some black coffee. Usually this revived her completely and she would continue until lunch or supper or bedtime, but sometimes, especially during the nauseous antics of the Little Colonel or the continual bawling of the Five Little Peppers who cried when they were happy, Gammy would drink cup after cup of black coffee but would still fall asleep and when she awoke would read the same paragraph over and over. We would make several futile trys to wake her and then would give up and go out to play.
Gammy was patient, impatient, kind, caustic, witty, sad, wise, foolish, superstitious, religious, prejudiced and dear. She was, in short, a grandmother who is, after all, a woman whose inconsistencies have sharpened with use. I have no patience with women who complain because their mothers or their husbands’ mothers have to live with them. To my prejudiced eye, a child’s life without a grandparent en residence would be a barren thing.
Such Duty
Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband. --SHAKESPEARE
1
And I’ll Be Happy
ALONG with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife’s bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work. “First make sure that your husband is doing the kind of work he enjoys and is best fitted for and then cheerfully accept whatever it entails. If you marry a doctor, don’t whine because he doesn’t keep the hours of a shoe clerk, and by the same token if you marry a shoe clerk, don’t complain because he doesn’t make as much money as a doctor. Be satisfied that he works regular hours,” Mother told us.
According to Mother, if your husband wants to give up the banking business and polish agates for a living, let him. Help him with his agate polishing. Learn to know and to love agates (and incidentally to eat them).
“It is depressing enough for a man to know that he has to work the rest of his life without the added burden of knowing that it will be work he hates. Too many potentially great men are eating their hearts out in dull jobs because of selfish wives.” And Mother had examples too. There was the Fuller Brush man who came to our house once a month and told Mother how deliriously happy he used to be raising Siberian wolves and playing the violin with a symphony orchestra until he ran afoul of and married Myrtle. The man in the A & P vegetable department who was lilting through life as a veterinary surgeon until he married a woman who hated animals but loved vegetables. And the numerous mining men Mother and Daddy knew who were held down to uninspiring company jobs by wives who wouldn’t face the financial insecurity of their husbands going into business for themselves.
“Boy,” we said, “when we get married, our husbands will do exactly as they please,” and they have.
This I’ll-go-where-you-go-do-what-you-do-be-what-you-are-and-I’ll-be-happy philosophy worked out splendidly for Mother for she followed my mining engineer father all over the United States and led a fascinating life; but not so well for me, because although I did what she told me and let Bob choose the work in which he felt he would be happiest and then plunged wholeheartedly in with him, I wound up on the Pacific Coast in the most untamed corner of the United States, with a ten-gallon keg of good whiskey, some very dirty Indians, and hundreds and hundreds of most uninteresting chickens.
Something was wrong. Either Mother skipped a chapter or there was some great lack in me, because Bob was happy in his work but I was not. I couldn’t learn to love or to know chickens or Indians and, instead of enjoying living in that vast wilderness, I kept thinking: Who am I against two and a half million acres of mountains and trees? Perhaps Mother with her flair for pioneering would have enjoyed it. Perhaps.
Where Mother got this pioneer spirit, how she came by it, I do not know, for a thorough search of the family records reveals no Daniel Boones, no wagon trains heading West with brave women slapping at Indians with their sunbonnets. In fact, our family tree appears rife with lethargy, which no doubt accounts for our all living to be eighty-seven or ninety-three.
Mother’s ancestors were Dutch. Ten Eyck was their name and they settled in New York in 1613. One of my father’s family names was Campbell. The Campbells came to Virginia from Scotland. They were all nice well-bred people but not daring or adventuresome except for “Gammy,” my father’s mother, who wore her corsets upside down and her shoes on the wrong feet and married a gambler with yellow eyes. The gambler, James Bard of Bardstown, Kentucky, took his wife out West, played Faro with his money, his wife’s money and even some of his company’s money and then tactfully disappeared and was always spoken of as dead.
We never saw this grandfather but he influenced our lives whether he knew it or not, because Gammy was a strong believer in heredity, particularly the inheritance of bad traits, and she watched us like hawks when we were children to see if the “taint” was coming out in any of us. She hammered on my father to such an extent about his gambling blood that he would not allow us children to play cards in any form, not even Slap Jack or Old Maid, and though Mother finally forced him to learn to play double Canfield, he died without ever having played a hand of bridge, a feat which I envy heartily.
The monotony of Mother’s family was not relieved in any way until she married Darsie Bard who was her brother’s tutor and a Westerner working his way through Harvard. This was a very shocking incident as Mother’s family believed that the confines of civilization ended with the boundaries of New York State and that Westerners were a lot of very vulgar people who pronounced their r’s and thought they were as good as anybody. Mother’s mother, whom later we were forced to call Deargrandmother, had fainting fits, spells and tantrums but to no avail. Mother went flipping off without a backward glance, to live, for Heaven’s sake, in Butte, Montana.
This was Butte in the early 1900’s. The time of the Copper Kings, when everyone made a million dollars, there were thirty-five thousand miners working underground and a saloon every other doorway. Irish scrubwomen became the wives of millionaires and had interior decorators come from France to “do” their houses. Lawns were imported blade by blade and given the care of orchids in order to make them grow in that sulphur-laden air. Oriental rugs were a sign of wealth and grandeur and were put on the floors three deep and piled in heaps in attics. Southern mansions, French chateaus, Welsh stone cottages, timbered English houses, Swiss chalets and American bungalows were built to house the rich Irish. Everyone was cordial, bluff and gay and entertained lavishly and all the time. A party was given at the Silver Bow Club to welcome Mother to Butte and she was amazed to find that the ladies of the town wore Paris gowns but painted their faces like prostitutes. Mother had been reared to believe that if you were unfortunate enough to be born with a pale green face, you, if you were a lady, would not for a moment entertain the thought of rouge, but would accept your color as your cross and do nice things for poor people. Mother had been reared this way but she didn’t endorse such nonsense. Fortunately she had natural colors so she wasn’t put to any test, but she was certainly pleased to find that the ladies of Butte, and there were many ladies in the strictest sense of the word, had kicked over the traces from Boston to Atlanta and were improving on nature with everything they could lay hand to. Mother loved the West and she loved Westerners.
My sister Mary was born in Butte. She had red hair and to appease Mother’s family was given the middle name of Ten Eyck which necessitated her fighting her way through grammar school to the taunts of Mary Tin Neck.
When Mary was less than a year old my father was sent down to the Nevada desert to examine gold property. Mother joyfully went with him and lived in a shack and rode horseback with the baby on the saddle in front of her. Both Mother and Daddy were happy in his work.
I was born in Boulder, Colorado. Gammy was with us then and the night I was born, when Mother began having pains, she called to Gammy (Daddy was away on a mining trip) and told her to phone for the doctor and nurse. But Gammy, prompted by the same inner urge which made her wear her corsets upside down, rushed across the street and pounded on the door of a veterinary and when he appeared, she dragged him bewildered and in his long underwear to Mother’s bedside. Mother, very calm, sent the poor man home, but because of the delay and confusion I was born before the doctor could get there and it was necessary for Gammy to tie and cut the umbilical cord. This was very unfortunate, as Gammy, a Southern girl, had been “delicately reared” and her knowledge of rudimentary anatomy could have been put in the eye of a needle. She thought the cord had to be tied into a knot and so grabbing me like the frayed end of a rope, she began looping me through and under as she attempted the knot. The upshot was that Mother sat up and tied and cut the cord herself and I was named for Gammy and became another in a long line of Anne Elizabeth Campbells. My hair was snow white but later turned red.
When I was a few months old Mother received the following wire from Daddy: “Leaving for Mexico City for two years Thursday—be ready if you want to come along.” This was Monday. Mother wired: “Will be ready” and she was; and Thursday morning, we all, including Gammy, left for Mexico.
Díaz was serving his last term as president of Mexico then, and Mexico City was a delightful place of Mexicans, flowers and beautiful horses. My sister, Mary, because of her brilliant red hair, was much admired by the Mexicans and learned to speak fluent Spanish, but I, an outstanding dullard, didn’t even begin to speak anything until almost three. There was a series of violent earthquakes while we were in Mexico but Mother, never one to become hysterical, inquired as to earthquake procedure, and when the lamps began to describe arcs in the air, the mirrors to sway and the walls to buckle, Mother sensibly herded Mary, Gammy and me into the doorway of the apartment, where the building structure was supposed to be strongest and, though the apartment building was cracked from top to bottom, we were all unharmed. A woman in the next apartment became very excited and rushed into the street in her nightgown, where, I am happy to relate, a water main burst directly under her.
From Mexico we moved to Placerville, Idaho, a mining camp in the mountains near Boise, where the snow was fifteen feet deep on the level in winter and Mother bought a year’s supply of food at a time. Our closest neighbor was a kind woman who had been a very successful prostitute in Alaska and wore a chain of large gold nuggets which reached below her knees. She was very fond of me, Mother says, and told everyone, to Gammy’s intense annoyance, that I was the “spitting image” of her when she was three years old. In Placerville, Mrs. Wooster (I believe that this was her name) had become a respectable married woman but evidently this palled, for Mother says she talked constantly of the “good old days.” I can feel for her because, although I have never been an Alaskan prostitute dancing on the bar in a spangled dress, I still got very bored with washing and ironing and dishwashing and cooking day after relentless day. Of course Mrs. Wooster had an extra hurdle in her path of boredom, that of the same old husband jumping into bed every night.
In Placerville, my father supervised his first large placer mining project and as the work was both dangerous and hard, Mother tore the partitions out of the crackerbox house, built a fireplace and bore my brother Sydney Cleveland, all by herself. Cleveland had red hair. All this red hair caused a lot of comment in Placerville, as Mother was a blonde with brown eyes and Daddy had jet black hair and gray eyes. What no one knew was that Daddy had a bright red beard if he let it grow. When Cleve was born Mother’s father wired her, “I trust you won’t feel called upon to have a child in every state in the Union.”
Our next jaunt was East to visit Mother’s mother or Deargrandmother. The moment we arrived, we children were stuffed into a nursery with an adenoidal nurse named Phyllis, and at my five-year-old birthday party the children were instructed by Deargrandmother not to bring presents. My, how we longed for Gammy with her shoes on the wrong feet and her easy friendly ways. Deargrandmother was noted for her beautiful figure and proud carriage but she toed out and had trouble with her arches. She taught Mary and me to turn our toes out when we walked, say “Very well, thank you” instead of “Fine” when people inquired of our health, and to curtsy when we said “How do you do?” She tried hard to scrape the West off these little nuggets, but as soon as we returned home Daddy made us walk like Indians again, feet pointed straight ahead. I would like to remark here and now, that this walking with feet pointed straight ahead is the only thing about an Indian which I would care to imitate.
When we returned from Auburn, we moved to Butte and lived there for the next four years.
Of Butte I remember long underwear which Gammy called “chimaloons” for some strange reason of her own. We folded our “chimaloons” carefully at the ankles so as not to wrinkle our white stockings. I remember my new Lightning Glider sled and coasting fourteen blocks downhill on Montana Street and hitching a ride all the way back. I remember icicles as big as our legs hanging outside the windows, and bobsledding at night with Daddy, who invariably tipped the sled over and took us home bawling. Creamed codfish and baked potatoes for breakfast and hot soup with grease bubbles which Gammy called “eyes” in it for lunch. Walking to the post office with Daddy on Sunday night and holding bags of popcorn in our clumsy mittened hands and drinking the hot buttery popcorn out of the bag. The Christmas when we had scarlet fever and the thermometer went down and stuck in the bulb and we got wonderful presents which had to be burned. Creaking down the street through the dry snow to dancing school, our black patent leather slippers in a flowered bag, our breath white in front of us. A frozen cheek that Mother thawed with snow. A wonderful sleighride into the mountains at night with the bells sounding like tinkling glass, the runners hissing softly and our eyes peering from heaps of robes.
When Cleve and I used to “rassle” to see who would get the biggest apple, the most candy, or any of the other senseless things children quarrel about, Gammy would stand over us and shout, “Get the hatchet, Cleve, and kill her now. You’ll do it some day, so why not now.” This infuriated us so that we would cease pounding each other and become bosom friends just to “show” Gammy. Perhaps this was her underlying motive but it used to seem to me that she was far too anxious to get rid of her little namesake.
My sister Darsie was born when I was in the second grade. She was small and had dark hair. Also in the second grade a little boy named Waldo wet his panties while we were standing in the front of the class for reading and I got so red in the face that the teacher, a horrid creature who said “wite” for white and “tred” for thread, blamed me and felt my panties, to see if they were dry, in front of the whole class.
Mary and I wore white stockings to school every day and shoes with patent leather bottoms and white kid tops. Mary turned her stockings wrong side out and wore them two days which would have been all right but she told everybody and I was ashamed. Gammy made us wear aprons which she called “aperns” over our dresses while we were playing after school. She would greet us at the door with the “aperns” but if we managed to sneak out without them she would stand on the porch and call in a high mournful wail, “Giiiiiiiiirls, come get your ‘aperns’” (this last a high banshee shriek). After school, if the weather was nice, we played on the Montana School of Mines dump and found lots of the little clay retort cups in which gold had been assayed.
When we said bad words, which we did as fast as we learned them, and Gammy or Mother learned of it, we were given “heart medicine.” This was a dark vile-tasting liquid which while shriveling our tongues was supposed to be purifying our hearts. I learned later that it was bitter cascara and no doubt served a double purpose. We could not understand why our “hired girls,” who said God and Jesus all the time, were never given “heart medicine” while we innocent little children used up about a bottle a week.
Our “hired girls” were hot tempered Irish girls who hated children, especially children with red hair, and smacked us and threatened to quit if we came into the kitchen. They showed surprising weaknesses, however, like the Mary whom Mother found one frosty morning weeping into the hotcake batter. “What is the matter?” Mother asked, thinking it was probably a man. “Jesus-God, Mrs. Bard, I can’t get the damned things round,” and she tearfully pointed out a heap of oblong and oval hotcakes she had thrown into the sink.
Butte had no budding trees, no spring flowers and no green grass, but we knew when spring came by the raging torrents that ran in the gutters. In one such torrent I found a five-dollar bill. I thought it was a shoe coupon—I was collecting them—and carefully scooped it out with the toe of my rubber and took it home to Gammy, who ironed it dry and told me that it was five dollars. This was the first paper money I had ever seen, as silver and gold were used exclusively in Butte, and I didn’t really feel that I had found five dollars until Daddy exchanged it for a gold piece which I put in my copper bank with the picture of the Anaconda Smelter on the front of it. Later Cleve and I hacked this little bank open with a mining pick and spent the five-dollar gold piece on penny candy.
In the spring Gammy took us for walks in the hills and we were careful not to fall in “prospect holes” which suddenly appeared at our feet, black, scary and bottomless. Gammy told us stories of heedless children who scampered off into the hills to play but never came back and years and years later their little white skeletons were found in “prospect holes.” We gathered bluebells and bitterroot daisies and wild garlic. The bluebells were a deep clear blue like fallen sky against the bare black rocks. The bitterroot daisies, the Montana State flower, had little foliage and no stems and lay flat and pink and exquisite on the brown hard earth. We painstakingly dug them up, careful of the roots, carried them home and planted them and they immediately died as all the topsoil of Butte was washed away years before in the placer mining days, and our yard was nothing but decomposed granite. We had one patch of grass in our front yard about the size of a pocket handkerchief. I played there with my dolls, but was very careful not to sit on the grass or injure it in any way, (What would a life-long resident of Butte think if he could have seen the country surrounding our chicken ranch—where fenceposts sprouted, vines crept into the house and everything was so green, green, green, it made me feel bilious?)
One winter in Butte, we were taken to see a play at the Broadway Theatre. The play was The Bird of Paradise and we all clung to Gammy’s hands and bawled when the beautiful heroine threw herself into the erupting volcano. The next spring we climbed Big Butte, a bare, brown mountain, a thousand feet high and almost in our backyard and were horrified on reaching the top to find a large crater and to have Gammy explain casually that this mountain, the very one on which we lay panting, was a volcano. We ran every inch of the way home, peering back over our shoulders expecting to see the top of poor old Big Butte a fiery furnace with white hot lava oozing down its sides. We never would go up there again and when the sulphur smoke hung low over the city, veiling the top of Big Butte, we were sure it was erupting.
The sulphur smoke smelled awful but Gammy made us breathe deep and suck it down inside of us. She said it disinfected our insides. She also made us drink gallons of vile-tasting water at White Sulphur Springs. Between the “heart medicine” and the sulphur water and smoke we should have been as pure as angels, but unfortunately this was not the case, for we worked diligently to find out where babies came from, until one fateful day when my sister, Mary, proclaimed to the assembled neighborhood children, from a little platform we had erected in the backyard, “Ladies and Gentlemen, babies are born out of people’s stomach holes.” I can still taste the heart medicine.
Gammy used to walk us downtown but as she made us close our eyes every time we passed a saloon the walks were valuable to us more for the fresh air than for the sights we saw. Once she had us open our eyes to see a hat in Hennessy’s store window which cost $105. We could not get over it. One hundred and five dollars for a hat! We made three trips to see that hat but I haven’t the faintest recollection of what it looked like, no doubt because I kept my eyes glued to the price mark. We had heard from Mother that Hennessy’s, the company store, also sold Paris gowns but they didn’t put these in the window so we never saw one.
Often cowboys in chaps and ten-gallon hats rode cayuses down Main Street and several times Indian braves on ponies, followed by squaws on foot with papooses on their backs, filed slowly past the one-hundred-and-five-dollar hat window. These were the Blackfeet Indians and they wore beautifully beaded dresses and chaps and terrific feather headdresses, and had long noses and cold Indian eyes. As Gammy had read us the stories of Hiawatha, Pocahontas and Sitting Bull and told us many hair-raising tales of massacres, scalpings and running the gantlet, we thought these Indians were simply wonderful, so strong and brave, and would run for blocks to see them. I still harbored these romantic notions about Indians when I moved to the chicken ranch, and it was a bitter blow when I learned that today’s little red brother, or at least the Pacific Coast variety which I saw, is not a tall copper-colored brave, who, clad only in beads and feathers and brandishing a bow and arrow, bounds around in the deep woods. Instead, our Indian, squat and mud-colored, was more apt to be found slouched in a Model T, a toothpick clenched between his yellow teeth, a drunken leer on his flat face. On the reservation he was orderly and well behaved and, we were told, used to engage in dangerous pursuits like whaling and seal hunting; but in appearance, at any rate, he resembled the story-book variety and my childhood Blackfeet Indian, about as much as a mud shark resembles a Beardsley trout.
Our summers were spent camping in the mountains. Usually we had a camp man and slept in tents and followed Daddy about while he examined mines, but other times we had cabins on a lake and stayed with Gammy while Mother and Daddy did the travelling. My still-smoldering hatred for and distrust of wild animals were implanted on these camping trips. Once we almost fell on a large bear, placidly eating huckleberries on the other side of a log. Another time Daddy pointed out a mountain lion lying in the sun on a ledge above our heads. Bears were always knocking down our tents and eating our supplies and at night the coyotes and timber wolves howled dismally.
Mother and Daddy fished incessantly and we had Rainbow trout, which we children loathed, three times a day. Sometimes Gammy came camping with us but only when we had cabins and didn’t spend our days “traipsing” through the mountains. Gammy stayed with us while Mother and Daddy took trips and fished and although they were considerate and always asked if we cared to come along, we always refused because Mother and Daddy loved danger and were always walking logs over deep terrible ravines; walking into black dangerous mine tunnels; wading into swift turbulent streams and doing other scary things. Gammy, on the other hand, carefully avoided danger and was constantly on the alert for it.
Summer days with Gammy were spent in her cabin with the doors and windows shut tight against the dangers of mountain air. We would all crouch around her rocking chair while she read to us out of Pilgrim’s Progress and fed us licorice drops out of her black bag. This routine was varied occasionally by a thunderstorm, whose first clap of thunder sent us hurtling under the bed clutching feather pillows and praying, or by very short walks during which Gammy called us all to a halt every few feet to listen for rattlesnakes. She had us whipped into a state where the rattle of a leaf would turn us white and sweatyand send us scurrying home to the safety of the cabin. Gammy impressed us with all of the dangers of outdoor living. She warned us against eagles, hawks, bees, flies—horseflies which bit—mosquitoes and gnats which might attack from the air; ticks, snakes, leeches, and bugs which might spring snarling from the ground; and she had us convinced that the trees along the edge of the clearing where our cabins were, were like the bars of the cages at the zoo and just behind them prowled hundreds of timber wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions fighting for a chance to eat us.
From the summers we spent with Mother and Daddy camping in tents, we returned to town brown and healthy, but from the summers spent with Gammy, we came back as jumpy as fleas and pale and scraggly from the hours of lying on feather pillows under the beds praying during the thunderstorms and the days crowded in the close cabins out of the reach of groping fangs. We, of course, never told brave, fearless Mother and Daddy about Gammy and the dangers of outdoor life, and they probably wondered why they, so strong and daring, should have produced this group of high-tensioned rabbits.
When Mother and Daddy went away from home on long trips, which they did frequently, we stayed at home with Gammy. She had us all sleep in her room on army cots and folding beds which she hastily and carelessly erected and which were always collapsing and giving us skinned noses and black eyes. Gammy kept a pair of Daddy’s shoes beside her bed and when she heard any noise in the house she leaned out of bed and stamped the shoes on the floor so that the robber or killer, whichever one happened to be downstairs, would think that there was a man in the house instead of “a lone helpless woman and several small children” all huddled upstairs waiting to be killed.
Our “hired girls” often came in late and I’ve wondered since if this stamping of manly feet upstairs in the dead of night, when they knew that Mother and Daddy were in New York or Alaska, didn’t lead them to believe that Gammy had a secret love life. To the casual eyes of a maid this idea might have been plausible, as Gammy was a very pretty woman, small with large blue eyes, delicate regular features and tinselly curly hair. But to those of us who knew her there were several good reasons why this wouldn’t, couldn’t be. In the first place Gammy hated men—all men, except Daddy. “Just like some big stinkin’ Man,” she would sneer as she lapped up the account of a rape or murder in the paper. Or, “The whole world’s run for Men and don’t you forget it,” she would warn us as she inspected us to see if our eyes were shut before marching us past the Silver Dollar Saloon. Or, when we were having mining men, friends of Daddy’s, to dinner, which we did six nights a week, Gammy would caution the hired girl, “Don’t make it so awful good. Men’ll eat anything. The pigs!”
In the second place, any lover of Gammy’s would have had to equip himself with enduring desire and a bowie knife, for Gammy was well covered. She thought nakedness was a sin and warned us, “Don’t let me catch you running around in your naked strip!” and for her own part, she merely added or removed layers of clothing as the weather demanded. On top she always had a clean, ruffly white “apern”—during the day this was covered by a large checked “apern.” Under the aprons were a black silk dress, a black wool skirt, a white batiste blouse with a high collar, any number of flannel petticoats, a corset cover, the upside-down corset with the bust part fitting snugly over the hips, and at long last the “chimaloons.”
In the third place, a lover of Gammy’s certainly would have had a lumpy couch with her nightgowns, bed jackets and several extra suits of “chimaloons” folded under the pillow, her Bible tucked under the sheet at the top right-hand side, any book she happened to be reading tucked under the sheet on the other side, little bags of candy, an apple or two, current magazines, numerous sachets and her bottle of camphor just tucked under the blankets or scattered under the pillows within easy reach. We children thought this an ideal arrangement, for when we were lonely or frightened Gammy’s bed was as comforting as a crowded country store.
Gammy was an inexhaustible reader-aloud and took us through the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Dickens, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Kipling, The Little Colonel, The Wizard of Oz, The Five Little Peppers, and all of Zane Grey, which we adored, before we left Butte. She changed long words to ones we could understand without faltering, but after an hour or two with The Little Colonel or The Five Little Peppers she would begin to doze and we would be dispatched to the kitchen to ask Mary the Cook for some black coffee. Usually this revived her completely and she would continue until lunch or supper or bedtime, but sometimes, especially during the nauseous antics of the Little Colonel or the continual bawling of the Five Little Peppers who cried when they were happy, Gammy would drink cup after cup of black coffee but would still fall asleep and when she awoke would read the same paragraph over and over. We would make several futile trys to wake her and then would give up and go out to play.
Gammy was patient, impatient, kind, caustic, witty, sad, wise, foolish, superstitious, religious, prejudiced and dear. She was, in short, a grandmother who is, after all, a woman whose inconsistencies have sharpened with use. I have no patience with women who complain because their mothers or their husbands’ mothers have to live with them. To my prejudiced eye, a child’s life without a grandparent en residence would be a barren thing.
Release Date: March 21, 1947
Release Time: 108 minutes
Cast:
Claudette Colbert as Betty MacDonald
Fred MacMurray as Bob MacDonald
Marjorie Main as Ma Kettle
Louise Allbritton as Harriet Putnam
Percy Kilbride as Pa Kettle
Richard Long as Tom Kettle
Billy House as Billy Reed
Ida Moore as Emily
Donald MacBride as Mr. Henty
Samuel S. Hinds as Sheriff
Esther Dale as Birdie Hicks
Elisabeth Risdon as Betty's Mother
John Berkes as Geoduck
Victor Potel as Crowbar
Fuzzy Knight as Cab Driver
Isabel O'Madigan as Mrs. Hicks' Mother
Dorothy Vaughan as Maid
Banjo the Dog as Sport
Uncredited players include William Bailey, Hank Bell, William Desmond, Teddy Infuhr, George Lloyd, Sam McDaniel, Howard M. Mitchell, Eugene Persson, Beatrice Roberts, Hector Sarno and Dorothy Vernon
Awards:
1947 Academy Awards
Marjorie Main - Best Actress in Supporting Role - Nominated
A longtime resident of Washington State, Betty MacDonald (1908-1958) authored four humorous, autobiographical bestsellers and several children's books, including the popular Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books.
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