Today in History: Nov. 25

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Helen Hooven Santmyer was born on this date in 1895. She became an overnight literary star at the age of 88 in 1983 when her first novel, …And Ladies of the Club, was finally published, hit the bestseller lists, and was turned into a miniseries.

The novel had been published by Ohio State University Press the year before to no fanfare, as it was OSU Press’ first work of fiction, and she was an unknown writer whose most recent work was a local interest memoir published twenty years earlier. Thus, her publishing history was short: a couple unnoticed novels in the 1920s, a memoir in the 1960s, and then a 1400-page novel about the life of a woman’s book club from the 1860s through the 1930s.

One day, an Ohio library patron (Santmyer lived in Ohio) heard a reader declare that the book was the best she’d ever read, so she signed the book out. This reader agreed with the assessment and phoned her son, who worked for a Hollywood agent. Hollywood came calling, and Santmyer, by now a nursing home resident, landed on the front page of the New York Times, the personification of a kind of patience.
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‘You can get anything you want’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

An essay in tribute to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”

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There are three quotes, three statements, in my head this Thanksgiving afternoon, 2016.

Earlier this morning, a friend and I were chatting about our different Thanksgiving Day plans and he asked me if I had ever been to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. (I almost marched in it, by accident of all things, but that is an anecdote for a different blog post. Perhaps later today.)

“Well, I just hope,” he said, that no one tries any terrorism down there today, but if they do,” and here he looked like someone who hoped that “someone” would “try terrorism down there” because he added, “If they do, I hope we go ahead and use our nuclear weapons the way they were meant to be used. Just go over there and flatten that whole place.”
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Sarah Hale: The Mother of Thanksgiving

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In most of her portraits, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, the reason we celebrate Thanksgiving in America, looks stern. Gentle, but stern. She was an editor, but befitting a woman of her era, she employed the term, “editress.” From age 33 until her death at age 90, she wore black, which designated her as a widow in mourning from the day her husband died until the day almost sixty yeas later that she was to join him.
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