Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  Above all the other family members glistened Betty’s older sister. Mary was the sun around which other family members revolved, whether they wanted to or not. She was feisty, bossy, opinionated, never without a plan. Betty had three younger siblings as well: Cleve, the only boy; Dede, the only small, dark-haired one among tall, ginger-tressed sisters, droll and quick-witted; and Alison, the youngest, brought up helter-skelter by the rest. In the corners, darting through the stories, squabbling like the children in need of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s cures, were Betty’s own daughters, Anne and Joan. And telling the tale was Betty, the bard, a Bard, her words carrying me into the past.

  I felt haunted by Betty’s world and how she saw it—by her books, her face, her story. When I read what was happening behind the doors of those houses, I wondered what she hadn’t said. Her world was still alive for me. I wanted to go there, to know her better than I knew her from the books I had read. I wanted, maybe, to haunt her back.

  I became tenaciously attached to knowing her better. I thought of myself as a sort of skip tracer, trying to locate Betty and her associates like a bill collector trying to find a missing debtor. I was skip tracing the dead.

  Did I have any right to do so? I can only say that in the way she haunted me, there was a kind of urging on. As the years passed, that urgency grew stronger. Betty and Mary, I sometimes joked, were hungry ghosts. Whenever I thought of them at all, they grabbed my mental steering wheel. I felt they wanted me to go off road, to find and tell the other parts of their story.

  I began dipping into history books and photography archives, trying to see Betty’s world when the Anybody house was hers. I wrote an article about the Anybody house, “Time-Traveling the Roosevelt District with Betty MacDonald,” for the weekly Seattle Press.4 I wondered frequently what that house looked like from the inside.

  Driving past the house, I sometimes lurked in the car, the engine idling. One summer morning in 2005, as I was parked in the alley behind the house, trying to picture the kitchen, a woman pulled her car up beside mine and looked at me quizzically. “Do you live here?” I asked. “I’m interested in an author named Betty MacDonald, who lived here in the 1930s.”

  “Oh, I know about her,” the woman said, “I have a newspaper article.” Her name was Tanya, and she invited me in.

  The house was very nearly as Betty had described it in her books: the ample living room with a fireplace, where the Bards played Chinese checkers and piano and listened to football and dance marathons on the radio; the main-floor back bedroom that was always cold. Tanya, like Betty’s mother, Sydney, was a painter, and she used that room as a studio. The house felt worn but tended to, with a carelessly eccentric air that I think the Bards would have appreciated.

  As Tanya walked me through, I looked for details that might have been there in Betty’s time—doorknobs, windows, the bathroom mirror. Tanya led me up the tight front stairs to a small hallway with three bedrooms. Tanya slept in the front bedroom, which Betty had said was Sydney’s room. When I saw the issue of the Seattle Press containing my article next to the bed, time bent for me. For just a moment, I felt I was reaching through the temporal boundaries separating me from the Bards and their life in that house. I felt their echo, and it thrilled me. The next day I left copies of The Plague and I and Anybody Can Do Anything in Tanya’s mailbox, thinking, as I dropped them off, that this was where the Bards got their mail.

  After that day, I felt the Anybody house had somehow given itself to me, bestowed the gift of retrospective clairvoyance, its cheerful, shabby rooms revealing the past. Going inside the house fully ignited my quest to find Betty. I started traveling beyond Seattle. I wanted to go everywhere Betty had lived, to the places she’d written about extensively and places she’d skimmed over with a line or two. I wanted to find all the houses and see inside them if I could. I wanted to glean all the details I could from historical records about the way those places had been when Betty lived there. I called these research trips, but they were pilgrimages.

  I traced Betty to the solitary old house in Boulder, Colorado, where her life began. I followed her to a modest house set high above a quiet street in Butte, Montana, and to a large brick school nearby. I found an empty road in Placerville, Idaho, where a small cabin once endured the bitter winters. I found homes in Seattle: a grand place overlooking Lake Washington that said, “We have arrived”; a sprawling, comfortable country house that told the world, “We’re staying, and we welcome you”; and the much more modest Anybody house on its busy street, which sighed, “Things didn’t quite turn out as we’d planned.”

  There was an empty field along a winding road in Chimacum, Washington, where a small farmhouse once nestled. Betty never loved that house, but people around the globe read what she wrote about it and traveled long distances to see it, to walk around and through it, tell friends they’d been there.

  There was an island home clinging to Vashon’s steep slope, smelling of wood smoke and salt air and echoing with ferryboat whistles. There was a town house bought and lavishly decorated with unanticipated windfalls. And finally, there was a sprawling ranch in Carmel Valley, California, with slopes of sagebrush that rolled on and on beneath a powder-blue sky, as if the land was telling its own story.

  At the beginning of this treasure hunt, I wanted to find Betty. By journey’s end, I wanted others to find her, this young woman whose face was as familiar during the 1940s and 1950s as any movie star’s, whose voice was the first—male or female—to entrance readers around the planet with a story deeply rooted in the great Pacific Northwest. I wanted none of her story lost. And I wanted modern readers—who knew her for the Piggle-Wiggles, if they knew her at all—to understand how richly Betty MacDonald deserved to be found.

  LOOKING FOR

  BETTY MacDONALD

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Richest Hill on Earth

  BETTY MACDONALD never saw herself as destined for greatness. Anyone taking odds on which Bard family member might achieve fame would have backed young Betsy’s father, Darsie, who worked so diligently, or else her older sister Mary, who had the boundlessly resilient ego for it. Betsy grew up in their shadows. She was shy but shared her family’s instinct to reframe life’s haphazard details into story. Bard family exploits were the ingredients for these tales. Bold adventure became bolder in the telling, and what was funny became hilarious. This was the way all of the Bard siblings, even quiet Betsy, claimed membership in the family tribe.

  As a young woman typing away on the manuscript of her first book, The Egg and I, during the dark days of the Second World War, Betty MacDonald did not know that this prodigious storytelling muscle would be her literal—literary—gold mine. Picking her way through the tale of her first marriage, Betty began with family stories: her childhood traipsing the mineral-rich Western United States, her rambunctious siblings, and her parents, Darsie and Sydney Bard.

  Betty’s parents began their married life in Butte, Montana. For the four Bard children who lived there when they were young, Butte was an outrageous place to form their first conceptions of normalcy, and it was rich with the material for story. In March 1903, when the newly married Sydney Bard stepped off the Northern Pacific train that had carried her from Boston to Butte, nearly ten thousand men labored in the mines beneath her feet.1 It was a raw place for an Eastern bride.

  Sydney had fallen in love with the serious but dashing Darsie Bard, a tall young Harvard student with jet-black hair, steady gray eyes, and whiskers that were copper-hued when he let them grow. Could she have imagined, when the couple had wed secretly three months before, that marrying Darsie would mean years of adventure in mining camps and towns throughout the West, far from the settled, elegant future she’d been brought up to expect?

  Butte was called the richest hill on earth. Beneath it, tunnels teemed with miners extracting ore. The wealth was mostly copper, deposited in massive chunks—called bodies, not veins—as large as twelve-story buildings. The city’s residents were blasting
and sifting its very foundation. The activity underground was the exact opposite of building a city.

  Butte was remarkably diverse. Many immigrants were Irish or Cornish, but so varied were the ethnicities of their workers that mines posted “No Smoking” signs in as many as sixteen languages. For the immigrants, it was Butte, America. The draw was mining and the many industries, legal and illegal, that supported it. The city was intensely industrial and densely urban.

  When Sydney arrived, Butte boasted 275 saloons and the largest red-light district in the West, with entertainment available twenty-four hours a day to accommodate the miners who worked shifts around the clock. Mine whistles set the town’s rhythm. The smelter, some twenty miles west in Anaconda, glowed red and belched smoke all night. The Butte Miners’ Union was the largest union local in the world, and Butte’s mines were statistically the world’s most dangerous. Funeral processions for miners seemed never-ending. Someone in Butte was always dying in the mines.

  For Sydney Bard, the contrast between Butte and her genteel Eastern upbringing was staggering. Before her marriage, Sydney had been Elsie Thalimer Sanderson.2 Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1878, she had trained as an illustrator at the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston. Darsie Bard entered her life as a tutor to her younger brother, Jim. Darsie was working his way through Harvard. Bard family lore has it that Elsie Sanderson interviewed Darsie for the tutoring job, and, after stumbling back to his boarding house in a daze, he swore to his roommate that he had just met the girl he was going to marry.

  Darsie Campbell Bard was not from the East, although he’d adjusted to Cambridge life, rowing varsity crew and earning respect for his quiet studiousness. He was born in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1878, and spent his teenage years in Portland, Oregon.3 He attended Portland High School and Portland Academy, achieving what the Oregonian called “a brilliant record as a student.”4 He continued to succeed academically at Harvard, where he had been accepted on his merit, not on his name.

  Like most of the all-male student body at Harvard, Darsie was a white Protestant. As a Westerner, however, Darsie was in a minority: most of the students were from New England. Moreover, Harvard students were defined by wealth and social class, and Darsie had neither. He earned his tuition and living expenses by tutoring and by working in Harvard’s astronomical observatory.5

  Darsie was raised primarily by his mother, Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard. She was tiny, with large blue eyes and curly hair, one of the beautiful Campbell sisters of Wheeling, West Virginia. Anne Elizabeth survived a difficult marriage by virtue of her own tenacious grit. This life rendered her both pragmatic and eccentric. We will call Anne Elizabeth Gammy, as she was eventually known to her grandchildren. This family abounds with members who share names—Bard, Cleveland, Anne, Mary, Betsy, Alison, Heidi, Darsie—so, best to simplify.

  Darsie’s father, James Bard, was a fairly successful business agent when he and Gammy married, but in 1880, when the couple was living in Denver, he began to gamble, funding the habit with money embezzled from the insurance agency that employed him.6 He went to jail. Gammy supported herself and Darsie by taking in sewing, teaching school, and working as a clerk. When James was released, the family moved to Portland, but James continued unrepentant, eventually abandoning his wife and son. Gammy filed for divorce.

  Betty later wrote that her paternal grandfather “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.”7 Gammy was granted a divorce on the grounds of desertion and cruelty in 1901, Darsie’s junior year at Harvard.

  Although divorce rates in America had been climbing since the Civil War, divorce still carried a considerable stigma. Betty’s sarcastic observation that James “tactfully disappeared” was apt. With James absent, Gammy could pass as widowed, not divorced, a common tactic at the time. Although James Bard actually lived for two more decades, to Gammy, he was as good as dead.8

  Having spent his childhood in the shadow of his father’s failings, Darsie was determined to succeed. During his final months at Harvard, he filled out an exit questionnaire listing his memberships (Mining Club, Natural History Society), declaring a preference for geology classes over Greek or fine arts, stating his ability to play piano, and offering that he’d been published in the Oregon Naturalist. Asked, “What advantages do you think you ought to have found at Harvard which you have failed to find?” Darsie responded, “Fellowship.” With Elsie Sanderson, Darsie found fellowship.9

  Raised with patrician values, but without great wealth, Elsie chose a man of quick intellect and obvious promise, but with no financial cushion. She and Darsie were well suited temperamentally. They became engaged during Darsie’s junior year, against Elsie’s mother’s wishes, and were married secretly in Boston on December 15, 1902, shortly before Darsie graduated. A few weeks later, Darsie departed for Butte, where he worked briefly for the Bell and Diamond mines before being hired by the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company (ACM) as a field geologist.10 A few months after Darsie’s departure, Elsie disclosed her marriage to her parents and younger brother. Days later, she boarded the train to Butte.

  Neither Elsie nor Darsie cared for her given name, and after they married, she began using the name Sydney. The name honored her elder brother, Sidney Cleveland Sanderson, who had died in childhood.11 Sidney was also her father’s name and her grandfather’s.

  Sydney’s mother, aspiring to see her only daughter rise in society, had taught her to manage servants, prepare fine cuisine, and hold her own in polite company.12 This set of skills was not in high demand in Butte, where social classes mixed together and where all wealth was new. There, Sydney’s strongest asset was her willingness. Once in the West, she pushed her sleeves up and set about making the place a home.

  Throughout her marriage, Sydney managed to be with Darsie under highly adverse conditions. As newlyweds, using Butte as their home base, the couple moved among remote mining camps, with Darsie inspecting mines, analyzing their potential, and suggesting ways to improve yields, and Sydney keeping house—sometimes in a tent. Sydney, ever sanguine, brought happiness, family life, and deep fellowship to their marriage. She was an excellent wife by all the standards of the time.

  Mining engineers were almost invariably male during these years, and their wives were expected to accompany them on their travels. Frequently living in remote locales away from women of their own socioeconomic class, the wives formed a supportive, if long-distance, sisterhood.

  Several of these women published accounts of their adventures. Josephine Hoeppner Woods was the first woman to earn a graduate degree from the State College of Washington (now Washington State University). When she was preparing to join her husband in the Peruvian Andes, Woods learned that the mining company required wives to obtain a doctor’s note certifying that they could endure high altitude. Before Lou Henry Hoover’s husband was elected the thirty-first president of the United States, she accompanied him worldwide on mine inspection trips, with babies as young as one month in tow; like her husband, she held a degree in geology from Stanford University. If these women wanted to see their husbands, they went along or (as when pinned down by advanced pregnancy or small children) visited as often as they could.

  When Darsie’s work extended for a long stretch, Sydney used a hotel room or rented house in the vicinity as a base camp while Darsie and his mining partners went farther afield. Darsie found the life exhilarating: locating rich areas of ore, attempting to buy out the prospector who had staked them, traveling across the country looking for undiscovered mineral wealth. Darsie was rugged, and his skill analyzing the soil—essentially, reading the ground—made him valuable.

  Four decades later, a mining partner of Darsie’s who had traveled with him in Nevada around 1906 remembered that the two had

  lived and breathed geology. . . . We had a team of horses that could be driven or ridden, and a Studebaker buckboard with our 1500 poun
d load of hay and grain, water, food, text books, working tools, and good clothes, etc. We went wherever we thought there was a chance for a mine, and we could camp anywhere on the bare ground and be at home. . . . We covered many hundreds of miles in Nevada and we examined hundreds of prospects. We climbed mountains—explored abandoned and unsafe mines—climbed around in stopes on all fours. Our lives depended on a rickety ladder. . . . We learned about mining engineering in these years, namely, the hard way.13

  This tale is romantic in its retelling—a formative Western myth sprung to life. Darsie was living it—willingly, eagerly—and so was Sydney.

  A little more than a year after she joined Darsie in Butte, Sydney was pregnant. The couple’s home base was a rented cottage on West Granite Street, two blocks from the hulking redbrick mansion built by the copper king William Clark for his first wife, Katherine. After her death in 1893, Clark had remarried and lived mainly abroad, but the mansion still visually dominated the neighborhood.

  By autumn 1904, Gammy had joined her son and daughter-in-law in the small house. On November 21, 1904, Sydney gave birth to a daughter, Mary Ten Eyck Bard, whose middle name honored Sydney’s Dutch ancestors. Eight months later, the Reverend Slator Clay Blackiston baptized Mary at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Grace Cahoon, the physician who had delivered Mary, served as one of her baptismal sponsors.14