Miss Osborne's Sculpted Scalp. Miss Nielsen's Mascot Mole. The Party Loves Pleasure More Than Anything Else. We Have Our Winners.
The Bankhead Gleaner, January 27
… it’s a matter of trusting your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. Russel Hoban, Afterword, Riddley Walker.
Elegant Things
A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat.
Duck eggs.
Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl.
A rosary of rock crystal.
Wistaria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow.
A pretty child eating strawberries.
Sei Shonagon, quoted above, the queen of all list-makers, is a writer of whom I never grow tired. She built her beautiful Pillow Book in Japan 1200 years ago, but her amused, peevish, sometimes melancholy voice is so clear and enduring that neither time nor distance can diminish it; nor can the vagaries of translation. I have the Ivan Morris version (Penguin) from 1967; there’s a more recent one by Meredith McKinney.
I tried recently to describe to someone — only because she had courteously asked — how I chip away at the rock of whatever small time remains. My reply — I’m an old man who sits alone and aggregates the details of mostly forgotten lives and events while waiting for the end — was accurate but also uninspiring; a real conversation cauterizer. I wish I’d had a better answer. I wish I’d been on the receiving end of her kind question just after re-reading Sei Shonagon, with her antique words fresh in my mind, as now they are. Her rationale is my rationale and she had an eloquent way of putting it. I should commit her concise explanation — slightly adapted — to memory, so I can offer it up, a more fragrant bouquet, should the occasion ever again arise.
I fill notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole, I concentrate on things and people that I find charming and splendid.
Shonagon’s work was enduring. Mine is not, nor should it be. She filled her notebooks — written in a studied hand, with fine ink, on exquisite paper gifted her by the Empress — with original observations, and I fill mine — in a crowded, infinite digital space — with what is merely found, mostly by accident. Consider that inventory of P-words. It was nothing I had in mind. I wasn’t looking for it. About Richwood, Ohio, I have no idea.
(Please stand by while I find that information. Your call is important to us. We appreciate your patience. Use this opportunity to listen to bland music of your own choosing for as long as you like. Thank you for holding.)
Richwood, Ohio, is in Union County. It was founded about 200 years ago. The population in the census of 2020 was a pleasing 2,222 and the high school team is called “The Wildcats.” Go, Wildcats. Go.
Quite what happened in Richwood between 1870 and 1880 I’m not sure, and I don’t care enough to find out, but in those ten years the population grew from 436 to 1,317, its biggest surge to date: a whopping 202.1%. So, perhaps there were 800 people of newspaper reading age in 1878 who might have taken account of and smiled at that list of P-words that caught my attention 146 years later, a column-filler at the bottom of page 1 (of 4) of The Gazette for October 3. Maybe a few of them clipped it out, enclosed it in a letter sent to friends or family elsewhere. A curiosity. A chuckle. Inconsequential. Has anyone paid it any mind since? Probably not. Does it matter? Not at all, not in the grand or even the minor scheme of things. But it pleased me to find it, and to consecrate thirty irretrievable seconds to wondering about the why of it, and by wondering to give it new life. Was this original content, or was it something making the wire service rounds, a mere squib that plugged a similar-sized gap in papers across the country? To me, it has the whiff of the former; for one thing, no external source is credited, which typically it would have been. If it’s original, then, to the Richwood Gazette, who was the writer or editor who devised this bit of whimsy-leavened satire? Useless question. There’s no way of finding out. Nevertheless, I salute you, dear dead and nameless friend. I think of you now, and I will forget you within the hour, but for these few seconds, I have my finger on the memory of your intermittent pulse. It remains discernible. You live.
The total number of pieces used in this operation was twelve thousand. “Miss Osborne’s Patches.” Richwood Gazette. September 3, 1878.
By chance. That’s how I found myself reading the Richwood Gazette from 1878; I’d been led there while following a particular scent, searching for something else. On page 1, the trail went cold. Pausing for breath, looking around, taking note of the P-list, I saw another headline that snagged my attention.
Miss Osborne was a special case, and the story of her patches was dire, fascinating and tragically common. What follows is necessarily graphic. In September of 1874, Lucy A. Osborne, 19, of New Milford, Connecticut, was at her job in a button factory. Leaning over her work, a stray strand of her hair became caught in the whirling shaft of whatever the machine at which she laboured. It tore off her scalp, and part of her right cheek. Unsurprisingly, that was not the the full extent of the facial damage. Lucy was badly beaten up.
Vivid, unsparing descriptions of workplace mishaps — thank you, Industrial Revolution — were usual in the papers of the time; a detail often included was how long it took the victim to die. Lucy didn’t die. For the next six years, she was a patient — not always in residence — of St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, where, slowly, painstakingly, surgeons reconstructed her scalp. Lucy Osborne (the name also appears as Osborn) was an early recipient of skin grafts, and the patches to which the headline refers were the seed-sized pieces of borrowed flesh that were laid in place where her scalp had been. On October 3, 1878, readers in Richwood, Ohio, learned that:
The pieces were contributed from the arms of the hospital surgeons. The total number of pieces used in this operation was twelve thousand. One of the surgeons contributed from her person one thousand two hundred and two pieces, and another gave eight hundred and sixty-five.
The other day, listening to the radio, I heard a doctor talk about how one of her colleagues was censured by other physicians for buying a toothbrush for a patient; she’s overstepped a line, become personally involved. How things have changed. What stopped me — I’m easily arrested, it’s true — in my tracks wasn’t just the appalling physical harm that had befallen Lucy, nor that her surgeons took a pound of their own flesh to bring about her restoration — but that such a close count had been kept. Who had made the tally? The doctors themselves? Was a nurse standing by, marking it all down? 1,202. 865. Remarkable specificity! Nor were the surgeons the only donors. Some skin for grafting was taken — this sounds more conventional — from Lucy herself, and as word of her situation spread prominent New York City clergymen and volunteer-minded society ladies also dropped by St. Luke’s and, in the most literal sense, gave of themselves.
The most complete account — apart from whatever write-ups might have appeared in medical journals — of Lucy’s six years as a patient at the hospital appeared in the New York Times in 1880, by which time the number of grafts was up to 14,000.; I’m quoting here from the story as it was syndicated in the Chicago Tribune, July 23, p. 6. This is the final paragraph; you’ll note the 100-count variation in the previously reported figure of 1,202. History is subject to revision.
The new scalp which has been built up for Lucy Osborn (sic) is hard, white, and glossy. There are no pores in the tissue, and it can never bear hair. Of the 14,000 grafts furnished, 1,102 were supplied by Dr. Valentine, now House Physician of the New York Dispensary, 915 by Dr. T. L. Steadman, 865 by Dr. A. B. Blauvelt, 850 by Dr. H. Richards, and 840 by Dr. Spaulding. Lucy is in the best of health and spirits and expects to have a completely reconstructed scalp soon. (1)
So much suffering. So much endurance. So much mystery. Perhaps I’m alone in never having heard tell before of Lucy Osborne / Osborn. How could I not have? Was I sick at home the day we were taught about her in school? Or is she inexplicably absent from the curriculum? Who decides who and what makes the cut in the remembered pageant of history? There are tens of thousand of Lucys out there, just as the sky is full of flaming comets that astonish you with their several seconds of incendiary brilliance if you happen to look up at just right time and in just the right place. What are the odds that you might? Mostly, they go unseen. Mostly, you miss them. Lucy’s story, which was there all along, would be unknown to me still had I not happened upon her and her accident by accident.
Here’s another story from that same date on that same first page of that same small-town Ohio paper, the Richwood Gazette, September 3, 1878.
This is charming, but I wouldn’t have paid it any mind had it not come to my attention within a few hours of two separate and — again, that word — accidentally related occurrences. The first was that I’d just had a conversation about Tuesday, a forthcoming movie; it’s a tale starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and it’s suffused with the stuff of magic realism. A teenage girl is dying. Her mother is distraught. A mysterious bird, parrot- like, representing death, manifests in their house and enables the acceptance of the inevitable. Nothing could be more up my alley. The news of this appealing, strange sounding film preceded my reading about the Seneca tale, so alike in its particulars, so spiritually adjacent, by just a few minutes. That confluence felt very odd. What are the chances? Similarly peculiar, for a different reason, was the word “Seneca,” with which I don’t routinely come into contact. I had, though, just a few hours earlier, via this fellow:
This is a self-portrait of Seneca Ray Stoddard (1844 - 1917), a pioneering photographer best remembered for the pictures he took documenting the Adirondacks and the area around Glen Falls, New York, where he lived. His work is highly regarded and collected. He’s been the object of retrospectives at MOMA and other galleries of gilded repute.
I fell in love with her the day I removed her mole.
Seneca had two sons. One of them, LeRoy R. Stoddard, would probably have known the story of the button maker Lucy Osborn(e.) As a plastic surgeon with a busy New York City practice in the early years of the 20th-century, Stoddard might well have studied with some of the doctors who numbered the strips they peeled from their own arms to give Lucy a new scalp. Dr. Stoddard was sometimes in the news, and not always for reasons strictly medical.
I’m backward tracking now. I got to Seneca Stoddard via his son, Le Roy, and I got to Le Roy via the American soprano Alice Nielsen (1872 - 1943), for many years a home-grown (born in Tennessee, raised in Missouri) American superstar in the worlds of opera and operetta. As for Alice Nielsen, I got to her through her mole. It was a prominent feature on her face, and such was her celebrity that other women, with a similar marking, were sometimes said to have “an Alice Nielsen mole.”
Miss Nielsen is more in love than ever with her mole, and nothing could induce her to part from her mascot.
Sencea Ray Stoddard died in 1917, and later that same year his son, Le Roy, his marriage to another singer now dusted and done, tied the knot with Alice N.. whose blemish he had removed. As the clipping above indicates, their union was not eternal. Hearts change, just as Alice’s had done vis a vis her mole, which once she’d regarded not as an excrescence for excision but as a cherished companion.
In the Inter-Ocean (Chicago), May 7, 1899, the writer of an article published prior to Alice Nielsen’s arrival in the city to star in Victor Herbert’s The Fortune Teller, described how the diva’s image was plastered about on the billboards around the city, and that a spot, prominent on her left cheek, had generated much speculation; many wondered if it was an applied plaster, an old-fashioned “beauty spot:” the Victorian equivalent of a temporary tattoo. But no!
The spot is a birthmark, a mole, a little dark-brown mole. … That mole Miss Nielsen looks upon as her especial mascot; she claims that it has brought her all the good luck she has ever had. … Miss Nielsen’s faith in the lucky nature of her mole was greatly strengthened during her last visit to New York.There is an astrologer in that city who interprets the significance of moles, which he calls the planet marks of the body, moles, according to him, being the sign of the planet which governed at the time of the person’s birth. The astrologer examined Miss Nielsen’s mole and bade her be extremely careful of it, for the dark-brown color of the mark and its peculiar position on the face betokened extraordinarily good fortune, long life, and a highly artistic career for her. Since the astrological reading, Miss Nielsen is more in love than ever with her mole, and nothing could induce her to part from her mascot.
Never say never is the lesson here. I was reminded, reading about the astrologer with a sideline in mole interpretation, about a list that comes up in a handy volume I hadn’t had reason to consult in a long while. It is:
The Oraculum has much to recommend it, and here I append the section most germane to our present purposes.
Moles.
Their Significance Either in Men or Women.
These significant marks on the body are very remarkable guides either to the good or bad fortune of anyone.
A mole on the left side of a man, denotes danger and strangling; in a woman, sorrow, and great pain in childbirth.
A mole on the left cheek, foretells fruitfulness in either sex, as does one on the nose.
A mole on the upper lip, shows happiness in marriage.
A mole on the breast, shows affection, loyalty, strength, and courage, which will gain honour.
A mole on the navel, shows many children to a woman; and in man, that he shall be vigorous.
A mole in the midst of the forehead, shows wisdom and conduct in the management of affairs.
A mole on the right cheek, shows the party too much beloved, and will come unto great fortune.
A mole on the left shoulder, show sorrow and labour.
A mole on the throat, denotes the party a great glutton, and by excess will undergo a great disease, and peradventure, sudden death.
A mole on the right eye, shows loss of sight.
A mole on the forehead of a man or woman, denotes they shall grow rich, being beloved, of their friends and neighbours.
A mole on the eyebrows, the men incontinent, and given to women; but if a woman, it shows she will have good husband.
A mole on the nose, shows that the party loves pleasure more than anything else.
A mole on the neck, shows a man to be prudent in his actions; but a woman of a weak judgment, apt to believe the worst of her husband.
Time — past time, let’s face it — to wrap this up. The whole business about moles and what they mean came to mind because I’d read the sad story about the Duchess of York, and the disclosure of the news about her malignant melanoma. That’s a grim diagnosis, as no one needs telling, and it’s to Sarah’s good credit that in her public remarks about her illness she dealt with the news with calm and equanimity, and took the opportunity to remind everyone that a visible change in a mole should be taken seriously, and that doctors should be consulted, not astrologers.
It was at this time of year — February 15 was the date, in 2017 — that the writer and broadcaster Stuart McLean, well and widely loved, died. He was 68. My present age. I remember the sudden rupture in the broadcasting schedule when he abruptly suspended his show, The Vinyl Cafe, in 2015. I can’t remember if there was a news release then about the melanoma that would kill him, but it was publicly known soon enough. I knew Stuart just well enough to send him a note full, as I suppose, of bland words of encouragement. I was surprised a few months later when a book from him arrived in the mail along with a short, friendly note thanking me (needlessly) and saying that he’d enjoyed Poetry Notebooks, 2006 - 2014 by Clive James — who wrote so candidly and hilariously, often, about cancer — and perhaps I would, too. I did. That was our final contact. We were cordial, but not good friends, not routinely in touch. The last time I’d seen him in the flesh was a few years earlier, I forget when exactly; I’d written a (not very insightful) piece about him for Readers’ Digest. For that assignment I spent some time on the road with Stuart and his band of Vinyl Cafe merrymakers. It was interesting being with him in the close confines of a tour bus, and discovering how serious a person he was. Dark. This was not surprising; he made his living making people laugh, and no one is grimmer, more fatalistic, than a professional funnyman.
That tour was through the Okanagan Valley. I remember particularly looking from the windows — it was late fall — and being struck by how beautiful the desert landscape was in and around the towns of Osoyoos and Oliver. It felt very — haunted, somehow. I thought of that hilly, dry countryside and I thought (again) of Stuart, when I heard earlier this week from Wendy Newman. Now, I’m assuming — I could be wrong — that this is the same Wendy Newman who was for many years an arts administrator in Vancouver — she ran the Vancouver East Cultural Centre and then a program called Art Starts in Schools — and who, last I knew, had moved to the South Okanagan, to Oliver, I think. Wendy and another Gleaner keener, Val Klassen, were able to decipher the coded personal ads I’d found in The London Morning Post and that I included here on January 23. Mesdames, merci! Directly I hear from you how best to make the transfer, I will send off the promised prize, a tin of cream of mushroom soup. This is the time of year when one wants such comfort in a can. I said there’d be one prize only but hell, I’m feeling generous. And grateful.
The coded messages were examples of mirror writing — everything set down backwards — and made a little more abstruse by the way the two people involved used abbreviations — “ltrs” for “letters” — and were also given to baby talk, substituting “l’s” for “y’s,” hence, “me yuv ou steel” for “I love you still,” and “lips” becomes “yips.” You get the idea. Cringe-making. All I can say is, they deserved each other. Here’s the original, with translation, and, again, my thanks.
March 25. EM evoy uo leets Tsetaerg od yeht daer ltrs. // ME YOVE OU STEEL GREATEST DO THEYREAD LTRS.
March 31. GNILLIK yrt tsop swen teews pohs yeroy. // KILLING TRY POST NEWS SHOP YOREY
April 2. YLPMIS tested meht reven duim gnilrad eb eurt leets eh savoy no yldam llahs os yppah rehtegot roop ymmu suomrone eroy spiy. // SIMLY DETEST THEM NEVER MIND DARLING BE TRUE STEEL HE YAVOS ON MADLY SHALL SO HAPPY TOGETHER POOR UMMY ENORMOUS YOUR YIPS.
April 12. NRAEY rof sessit ylpmis dam diw evoy nehw nwot etirw no teiuq gnol rof uo eired gnikniht guivoy elppa eurt leets. // YEARN FOR TISSES SIMPLY MAD WID YOVE WRITE ON QUIET LONG FOR OU DEARIE.
April 16. TNOD tegrof yevoy licnep elddim thgin nehw noitats tsop retaerg naht reve. // DON’T FORGET YOVEY PENCIL MIDDLE NIGHT WHEN STATION POST GREATER THAN EVER.
April 17. QMFBTXSJUF jgqpttjemfmfu nflopxipx zpvbsfxibuzpv bsfenjoh Bntpboyjpvt upifbs tptmpxifsf sfnfncfsbepvu mfuujohzbdiu. — MIZPAH AJAR // THIS IS NONSENSE, SENT IN BY SOMEONE HAVING SOME FUN AT THEIR EXPENSE, I EXPECT.
(1) Here’s the footnote. You’ll wonder, as I did and do, what happened to Lucy Osborn(e). Her eventual outcome, of course, was never in doubt, but I can’t tell you when she died. She was still alive in 1911, when it was reported that she had come back to Connecticut from another visit to St. Luke’s. There was nothing more to be done, they’d told her. She was, then, going blind, and there was no cure. I suppose it was accident-related, her eyes had also suffered the consequences of the tragic accident in 1874. Finally, here’s a Bonus Track for anyone who has made it to the end of this long, too long, post. Alice Nielsen, Il Bacio. The Kiss. From 1908. Her mole intact.
Hi Val -- terrific! If you'd rather Campbell's that can be arranged. The PC is one to which no milk or cream or anything needs to be added. The Amy's brand is also good, also no additive required. You can email me your address -- wmjrichardson@gmail.com -- and I'll send it off!
Thank you for the can of mushroom soup, and the title "Gleaner Keener", which I accept with pleasure. I am happy that solving all those crossword puzzles and jumbles finally paid off. I can send you my mailing address. I look forward to trying the President's Choice brand, having long been loyal to Campbell's. I love reading your stuff, Bill! It is always a highlight of my day.