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

by Paula Becker

  Then, too, Mary, with her flamboyant red hair and live-wire personality, was nearing young womanhood, in greater need of supervision and protection from a population of rough men. Betty remembered that the children’s forays into Uptown were strictly chaperoned. Gammy insisted that they close their eyes when walking Butte’s raucous streets, but such restrictions could not be enforced forever. Butte was no place to let daughters roam—or a son, for that matter. Perhaps Darsie and Sydney did not want their children to come of age in Butte.

  Darsie and Sydney envisioned more for their four surviving children, and for themselves. Darsie had proved his skills by demonstrating leadership and scholarship at the School of Mines. He had amassed enough private clients to feel confident about earning a steady income from consulting work. He was a Mason and a member of Butte’s prestigious Silver Bow Club. He knew the major players in the mining business well. The time had come to step into the role of businessman.

  A mining trip took Darsie to Mount Baker in northwest Washington. Sydney was with him, and en route they visited Seattle.35 Although Darsie had grown up in Portland, he had apparently never been to Puget Sound, and he was immediately captivated. Seattle was near enough to mineral riches for Darsie to pursue his work, an important business nexus, and far less rough than Butte. A move to Seattle would give Darsie and Sydney the opportunity to raise their family in a permanent and cultured place.

  In the late summer of 1916, Darsie resigned his position at the Montana School of Mines. Sydney and Gammy packed up the household. Mary and Betsy and Cleve said goodbye to their friends. Accustomed as they were to moving, the Bard children had never ventured to such a cosmopolitan new city. They traded up: modest Big Butte for towering Mount Rainier.36

  Montana is stark, lushly tinted but sparse in vegetation. In Butte’s decomposed granite soil, rich in minerals, sagebrush grew, but not much more. No trees, no vegetable gardens, no rows of hollyhocks softened the fences of the miners’ cottages. Young Betsy’s front yard had one tiny square of grass that struggled to survive in the hostile environment. Betsy treasured it, protected it, and played on it, laying her dolls on the tenacious green patch.

  When the wind blew from the direction of the Anaconda smelter, Butte’s air was fumed with toxic smoke, yielding stunning sunsets that were likely taken for granted. The Bards were bound for a completely different environment, where sunsets were obscured by rain clouds and the landscape was lush and green. Betsy Bard was plucked from her familiar smoky-aired, smelter-glowing, bruise-colored landscape and transplanted to taciturn Seattle—wet, gray-skied, with towering trees and mountains, and birdsong that was not drowned out by blasting dynamite.

  Everything Betty MacDonald wrote about the verdant, wanton, overwhelming Pacific Northwest landscape was written not only through observation but in implicit contrast to Butte, where she formed her earliest memories, where she learned to observe people’s foibles and to take the measure of the world. Butte was frantic with industry under her feet; its multiethnic citizenry embraced the outlandish and eccentric. The whores, the miners, the housemaids, and the millionaires formed the fabric of Betty’s early life. Butte was her measuring stick.

  Betty would mine her rich memories of childhood as inspiration for her stories. Whether or not the Bards were seen as eccentric in Butte, that city sowed eccentricity in them. In time, the family would be perceived by acquaintances as deeply unconventional, and by the world at large—because of Betty’s books—as characters both familiar and unique.

  Perhaps Betsy had seen postcards of Seattle’s Smith Tower. The 462-foot marvel was the tallest building west of the Mississippi river and boasted an observation deck from which visitors could gaze across Puget Sound toward the mountains on the wild Olympic Peninsula. Nine-year-old Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard could not have dreamed that she would someday sit down at a typewriter made by L. C. Smith—whose son built the tower—and compose a tale based on her own life on that wild peninsula, a story that would be read around the globe.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fate Alters the Plot

  IN autumn 1916, the Bard family arrived in a Seattle that was full of promise. William Boeing was in the earliest stages of developing the aircraft company that would bear his name and become synonymous with his city. The Lake Washington Ship Canal, connecting Lakes Union and Washington with Puget Sound, was nearing completion. The business community was robust. The city had a symphony orchestra, a Fine Arts Society, theaters, and a well-stocked public library with branches throughout the city. Nellie Cornish’s school taught classical music, dancing, painting, and singing. Seattle’s parks offered ready outdoor recreation, and nature was within easy reach.

  The move to Seattle meant, Betty wrote, that “pioneering days were over and preparedness for the future began.”1 Sydney enrolled Betsy and Mary in singing, piano, folk dancing, ballet, French, and drama lessons, readying them for a future as refined ladies. Saturday mornings were reserved for gym class followed by swimming at the YWCA in downtown Seattle.

  While Darsie and Sydney explored the neighborhoods of their new city in search of their ideal permanent home, the family rented a house in the area called Capitol Hill. Previously the residence of the Danish consul, the place was grand, three times as large as the Butte house. The Bards enjoyed territorial views, three floors of airy rooms, and a basement large enough to serve as a ballroom or a gymnasium.

  Darsie and his business partner, J. C. Johnson—operating as Bard & Johnson, consulting geological engineers—leased office space on the twenty-first floor of the Smith Tower.2 With Darsie’s existing clients as their base, the new firm soon amassed an impressive client roster, including the Milwaukee Railroad, the Ladysmith Smelters of Vancouver Island, and the Butte & Superior mining consortium.

  Darsie joined Seattle’s University Club and Arctic Club. Founded in 1907, the Arctic Club’s charter members included more than two hundred men from mineral-rich Alaska. Many of the Northwest’s most active and important businessmen belonged to the club, and their grand clubhouse at Third Avenue and Jefferson Street provided reading, dining, billiard, and assembly rooms, as well as 120 sleeping rooms—about six times more rooms than the Silver Bow Club, Butte’s equivalent facility. The University Club, founded in 1900, encouraged social interaction among Seattle men who had graduated from college or university.3 Its members could use the private dining room and squash courts and participate in frequent social gatherings. Both of these clubs afforded Darsie opportunities for networking among Seattle’s social and business elite. The memberships also boosted his family’s social opportunities.

  Betsy, Mary, and Cleve were enrolled briefly in Lowell Elementary, the public school nearest their rented house.4 In fall 1917, Betsy and Mary were transferred to St. Nicholas School, a private institution whose mission was to prepare girls for college or university and for leading roles in Seattle society. The school was housed in a three-story building at 712 Broadway North (now East), a short streetcar hop from the Bards’ Capitol Hill home.5

  St. Nicholas students were the daughters of Seattle’s male business community and their wives, who led, facilitated, and funded the city’s cultural and benevolent enterprises. Young women educated at St. Nicholas were encouraged to use their wealth for good rather than to rely on it for privilege. The school stressed academics, proper behavior, and helping the less fortunate. St. Nicholas students “adopted” a ten-year-old French girl during World War I (Mary Bard was among the young patronesses) and performed interpretive dances at a fund-raising luncheon for the Seattle Day Nursery, which provided care for the children of low-income working mothers (Misses Elizabeth and Mary Bard, among others, frolicked in the “Dance of Joy”).6 For St. Nicholas girls, rolling bandages for the Red Cross and raising funds for the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital went hand in hand with learning to host teas and formal dinner parties. These lessons were firmly reinforced at home.

  Betsy and Mary studied dancing at Nellie Cornish’s school. “ �
��One, two, three, LEAP!’ shouted our ballet teacher, as she pounded her stick on the floor. Mary leaped so high they had to pull her down off the ceiling but I, who had also seen Pavlova and the Duncan Dancers, rubbed my ballet slippers in the rosin and dreaded my turn,” Betty wrote of these lessons.7

  The Bards seem hopeful in 1917, their new life freshly begun. It was a long way from Butte’s clattering ore cars and shrieking mine whistles to Seattle’s pattering raindrops and lush front lawns. Confident Mary quickly took root in the Bards’ fertile new environment: she had no trouble learning to be grand. Betsy—whose grades were better than her sister’s—picked her way through the St. Nicholas social scene more shyly.

  Darsie and Sydney settled on the idea of a country environment for their children. In autumn 1918, they found a comfortable, gracious house in Seattle’s Laurelhurst District.8 The house was warm and welcoming, painted light gray and wrapped in a broad wooden porch. Climbing the steep steps to this porch brought the expanse of Lake Washington into view, offering prospects of refreshment, exploration, and adventure.

  The house was built in 1900, and stood alone on land homesteaded by some of the first settlers to the area, which was not yet called Laurelhurst.9 The land was sold to developers in 1907 and divided into large lots. In 1910, it was annexed by the city of Seattle. Over time, the empty lots around the Bards’ house would slowly fill with other homes. When the Bards had lived in the house nearly a year, Darsie and Sydney purchased two adjoining lots and Gammy a further two, giving the family a sizeable compound.10

  When the Bards moved to Laurelhurst, it was much more like the country than the city. It was about six miles from Seattle’s central business district—just close enough to be accessible over the bumpy roads by automobile, but far enough away to offer respite. Unlike other Seattle neighborhoods, whose fortunes have waxed and waned, Laurelhurst has been steadily posh. For a short time during early 1900s, the land adjacent to the property Darsie and Sydney bought was Seattle’s first golf club. The club was gone, but the pastoral feel that had attracted its developers remained. Despite Laurelhurst’s distance from the city, grocers, ice men, and a fishmonger happily called for orders and made deliveries.

  After the move, Betsy and Mary continued at St. Nicholas. Darsie dropped his daughters at school on his way downtown, or they caught the Laurelhurst jitney. This vehicle—an elongated Ford touring car—was purchased jointly by Laurelhurst families frustrated by the fact that Seattle’s public transportation network ended far from their neighborhood. The jitney ride could be terrifying: after meandering its way through the neighborhood, the unwieldy vehicle had to charge up a steep, one-lane wooden trestle bridge that carried traffic over a marsh, finally reaching the University District and the city streetcar line.11

  In Laurelhurst, the sense of nature, space, and calm was palpable. A quick bushwhack from the porch brought the Bards to Lake Washington, where they hosted beach parties. Long woolen bathing suits were the accepted attire for women and girls at the time, but Mary and Betsy’s friends recalled the sisters’ habit of swimming nude if not in mixed company.

  Mary’s lifelong friend Margaret Bundy Callahan remembered, “The Laurelhurst home was surrounded by knobby old fruit trees, pasture and woodland. It sat high on a bluff above the water and its unpretentious, spacious rooms rang always with the voices of many children. A horse, a cow, chickens, dogs, cats were added quickly to the family group. Mrs. Bard always loved animals and gardening. Life was very full and very happy.”12

  The heart of the house was its large, high-ceilinged dining room. The Bards’ table was accommodating, and Sydney’s excellent cooking and ready welcome drew many visitors for food and conversation. There was a partial basement where the children could play on rainy days, bedrooms upstairs—Betsy and Mary shared a bed—and an attic, where treasures and collections could be squirreled away. Eleven-year-old Betsy began to make up stories to amuse her siblings, especially Mary, for whom she spooled out the adventures of two orphan sisters, Nancy and Plum. If Betsy flagged, Mary would plant her icy feet on Betsy’s back, refusing to take them off until she continued the tale.13

  With the Laurelhurst house, Darsie and Sydney put down permanent roots and began a more social chapter of their lives together, fulfilling aspirations that Butte could not satisfy. The Laurelhurst house was both a home and a showplace for entertaining. Darsie was making good on his determination to be a better man than his own father.

  Betty’s books describe Darsie as a man whose love for his children was expressed in part by a desire to help them develop self-discipline. He required them to rise early, take cold baths, drink no water with their meals, forgo salt, use the gymnastic equipment at the YWCA and YMCA, and play sports. He prescribed healthy after-school snacks: fresh vegetables, apples, smoked herring, and hardtack. At their father’s insistence, the siblings performed exercise routines to instructions from a record played on the Victrola. He taught them tennis, playing doubles on a public court on Saturday mornings.

  To become self-reliant and gain useful skills, the girls learned to cook from Sydney. Darsie taught Cleve archery. The siblings were given complicated chores, including painting the house’s steep roof. Darsie took them on birding hikes along Lake Washington Boulevard near the lake’s then-wild shore, guidebooks in hand, insisting that they learn to identify birds and their calls.

  From birth, Betty wrote, her father helped her and her siblings to develop their intellectual abilities. He quizzed them with intelligence tests, played mental games with them, tossed them math questions, and demanded rapid-fire lists of synonyms and antonyms. Darsie ensured the Bards’ financial security, but more than that, he provided the family’s structure, direction, and discipline.

  Sydney was perhaps less Darsie’s co-captain or first mate than a favorite passenger. Betty’s books and the accounts of family friends portray Sydney as an indulgent mother, quick to accommodate her children’s whims, and quite ready to abandon the health and discipline regimens her husband established for their children once his back was turned.

  Darsie Bard published frequently and was considered a leader in the field of mineralogy. Visiting mining sites was still a part of his consulting business, but another lucrative aspect of it was serving as an expert witness in court cases. Many minerals cases were tried in Butte, and Darsie traveled there frequently to testify.

  In January 1920, temperatures in Seattle hovered just above freezing. Sydney, at age forty-two, was four months pregnant. Dede, remembered in family accounts as her father’s little shadow, had just turned five. The family celebrated Dede’s birthday without Darsie, who had taken the train to Butte to testify in a case at the Silver Bow County Courthouse.

  The news arrived from Butte by telegram, sent by Dr. Tom Moore, long the Bards’ family physician: Darsie was ill, and Sydney should come at once. She packed a bag, rushed to King Street Station in downtown Seattle, and boarded the Northern Pacific train for the twenty-one-hour journey east toward Butte. Darsie lay in Murray Hospital, his breathing labored. Old friends met Sydney’s train and drove her to Darsie.14

  Darsie Bard died in the early hours of Saturday, January 24, 1920, with Sydney at his side.15 He was forty-one years old. “Acute double lobar pneumonia,” Dr. Moore’s pen scratched across the death certificate.16 The Anaconda Standard headlined the news of Darsie’s death, calling him “one of the foremost geologists and mineralogists in the United States,” and accompanying the obituary with a large etching.17 The paper, printed daily in Anaconda, was delivered to Butte on the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railroad, clacking down the tracks that ran directly behind the Bards’ old house on Granite Street—taking Darsie’s handsome, thoughtful face past the house once more. That evening, the Butte Masonic Lodge conducted services in Darsie’s memory, while Sydney brought her husband’s body back to Seattle for cremation. Butte had been Darsie’s home, off and on, longer than anyplace else, and many friends and former students there mourned him.

&n
bsp; Darsie’s funeral was held in Seattle on the afternoon of January 26, at Bonney-Watson funeral parlor. Seattle newspapers scarcely mentioned the event: Bard & Johnson was a new company, and Darsie had only just begun to integrate with the large business community.

  The Bard siblings now faced a tenuous future. They were poised on the brink of the boom times of the 1920s, and it seems likely that their fortunes would have been different if Darsie had lived. All of Betty MacDonald’s recorded memories of him suggest that Darsie had steered the family. It is impossible to imagine Betty experiencing the events recorded in The Egg and I had her father lived.

  Sydney was well prepared to be a wife but ill prepared to be a widow. In some deep way, the blow of Darsie’s death unmoored her, perhaps because Darsie himself had been her mooring. Without him, Sydney was adrift, rendered incapable of plotting her own destiny. She became a pawn, especially to her children. The shock of Darsie’s death wore off in time, but some essential part of Sydney’s ability to function remained flaccid.

  Darsie’s death created unexpected financial difficulties. Despite her grief, Sydney had to address these immediately. Because of a technicality in his will, which had not been properly witnessed, the family was left completely without income.18 To access funds from his estate to cover the expenses of daily living, Sydney had to go to court.

  Trying her best to cope with settling the estate and with the sudden lack of funds, Sydney moved thickly through the final months of her pregnancy. She petitioned the court for the release of almost all of Darsie’s estate, to be invested in first mortgage bonds in the Carnation Company. Carnation produced canned evaporated milk, which could be stored and be shipped unrefrigerated. The bonds would draw interest at the rate of 7 percent per annum and would mature five years after purchase. The reasons behind Sydney’s investment decision are unclear. Carnation was headquartered in Seattle, and it is possible that she knew executives from the company, or their wives. Just as likely, she had read about the bonds on the stock pages of Seattle newspapers, which frequently advertised Carnation’s investment opportunities with hooks like “You can do without an automobile but can you do without milk?”19 The judge authorized the expenditure.20