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

by Paula Becker

  The stated goal of Firland’s medical director, Robert Stith, was to ration available funds and limited beds by admitting those who were, in his words, “worth saving.”25 By this he meant the patients with the best chance of recovery, who might again contribute to society. Women with dependent children, like Betty, often jumped Firland’s lengthy waiting list. Being Clyde Jensen’s sister-in-law also helped.

  At the time, the only treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis involved walling off the diseased portion of the lung from healthy tissue with fibrosis (scar tissue). Lungs were to be kept as close to immobile as possible to allow the delicate fibroid tissue to form. Patients had to endure inactivity, resting in a fully reclined position. Reading, writing, and talking were forbidden. Coughing, except to produce a morning sputum sample, was to be suppressed. Because patients in stuffy rooms were more likely to cough, spreading their germs and possibly rupturing their own fibroid tissues, fresh air was considered essential. Screened windows were kept wide open year-round. Nourishing food was plentiful, and patients were expected to eat well to build their strength.

  Among American sanatoria, Firland’s policies were quite rigid. All sanatoria prescribed bed rest, but patients’ descriptions of the grim determination with which Firland’s nurses enforced the rules make it sound almost like living in a penal colony. Anyone unwilling to fall in line was exhorted to leave and free up a bed for someone compliant. Visiting hours were twice weekly. For their own protection, children were permitted to see hospitalized parents for only fifteen minutes once a month. They had to stay at the door of the room and were not permitted to touch their parents.26

  Some patients underwent surgical procedures to further immobilize the lungs. These involved injecting air into the space surrounding each lung (artificial pneumothorax) or removing ribs so that the chest wall sank in against the underlying lung (thoracoplasty). Because tuberculosis patients could not be subjected to general anesthesia, this thoracic surgery was performed under local anesthesia using Novocain or sodium pentothal.

  Betty underwent artificial pneumothorax:

  I felt the prick of the hypodermic needle, just under my left breast, then an odd sensation as though he were trying to push me off the table, then a crunchy feeling and a stab of pain. “There now,” the Medical Director said, as he attached the end of what looked like a steel knitting needle to a small rubber hose connected to two gallon fruit jars partially filled with a clear amber fluid. The nurse put one jar higher than the other and I waited frantically for my breathing to stop and suffocation to start. There was no sensation of any kind for a few minutes then I had a pulling, tight feeling up around my neck and shoulder. The doctor said, “I guess that’s enough for today.”27

  The treatment was repeated periodically for months or (as in Betty’s case) years.

  At Firland, as at other sanatoria, patients from vastly varied walks of life were thrust together to live beneath the shadow of death. Some responded with courage, some with terror, some with humor, some by giving up. Their lives revolved around their symptoms and their treatment. Several of the women Betty met at Firland became close friends. Kazuko Itoi, nicknamed Kazi (later Monica Sone), had grown up in the hotel that her Japanese immigrant parents operated on the edge of the historic Japantown/Nihonmachi, in what is now Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Kazi entered Firland at age eighteen, about a month before Betty arrived, and her droll humor was well matched with Betty’s. They were discharged on the same day. Gwen Smith (later Croxford) was in the midst of a two-and-a-half year stay at Firland when she and Betty met. She was discharged around the same time Betty and Kazi left, but relapse forced her to return. Norah Olwell (later Flannery) was a young University of Washington graduate who captivated and comforted Betty with her kindness and bright intelligence. Betty’s letters to these women, written after her discharge, are as intimate in tone as those she wrote to family members.

  Betty was on complete bed rest for seven months. In her eighth month, she was allowed out of bed for eight hours each day. She was discharged in June 1939, nearly nine months after her admission. This was a remarkably short course of treatment: when she was admitted, the average stay for a Firland patient before being discharged alive was one year, eight months, and eighteen days.28 Many Firland patients remained at the hospital for years or even decades, or were discharged only to experience relapse and readmission. Many died.

  Patients who recovered from tuberculosis lived under the constant threat of relapse. Betty was encouraged to continue resting after being discharged and to have frequent checkups. She underwent outpatient intrapleural pneumolysis (the cauterization of adhesions between the chest wall and lung that, uncauterized, prevent a satisfactory collapse of the lung) and pneumothorax procedures for six years after her discharge, until the spring of 1945.

  Betty’s battle with tuberculosis did not crush her spirit, but it changed her. She emerged chastened that she had ever taken health for granted, grateful that fate and physicians had granted her a second chance. During the first weeks after her release, trying to regain her footing in the busy Bard household, Betty rose early and worked on transforming the simple journal she had kept during her hospitalization into a more complex description of her experiences. Unsure of how to make the jump from journal entries to full narrative, she kept the diary-style format, struggling to capture the vivid, varied personalities of her fellow patients and of the nurses—some gentle, some authoritarian—who had ruled her life for nine months. She submitted the manuscript to be considered for the Atlantic Prize, bestowed by Atlantic Monthly Press, but received a polite brush-off.29

  Betty found work with the National Youth Administration (NYA), the Works Progress Administration (later Works Projects Administration) program charged with training and providing jobs for young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Hired as a secretary, Betty eventually rose to the position of the Seattle project’s art supervisor and head of publicity, with ninety-five young artists and writers working for her. The work gave her plenty of opportunity to hone her writing skills. She wrote copy for brochures, drafted press releases, taught workers to produce newsletters for organizations such as the YWCA and the Boy Scouts, and critiqued manuscripts for young people enrolled in NYA writing programs. She also supervised young artists who created signs, murals, posters, book covers, and other artwork.

  While she was working at the NYA, probably around late 1941, Betty met Donald Chauncy MacDonald. Bard family lore credits Cleve—whose fingers were apparently in every pie—with introducing Betty to Don, as he had introduced her to Robert Heskett.30 When they met, Don was working for Boeing as part of the team that performed final quality checks before the company delivered airplanes to the military.

  Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1910, Don spent his childhood in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved to Seattle at the age of sixteen with his parents, Beulah and Clinton.31 Clinton MacDonald managed an apartment house near the University of Washington, and Don lived with his parents throughout most of the 1930s. From 1937 to 1939, Don was enrolled in Edison Technical School, a vocational program run by the Seattle Public Schools, studying dry cleaning. Don worked for the American District Telegraph Company as a signal timer and later for the American Alarm Company as a watchman.

  Photographs of Don reveal a trim, attractive, impeccably groomed man. The camera rarely catches him smiling. He was, Betty drolly told friends and eventually wrote, a dour Scotsman. His hair was dark, like Darsie’s and like Bob Heskett’s. That Betty was divorced did not trouble Don; nor did the fact that she had daughters, who were by then twelve and fourteen.

  Betty and Don were married by a justice of the peace on April 24, 1942, when she was thirty-five and he was thirty-one. Alison Bard and her fiancé, Frank Sugia, were witnesses. Betty and Don traveled thirty miles north of Seattle (in King County) to marry in Everett (in Snohomish County), perhaps to avoid having to apply for a marriage license where many people knew about Betty’s treatment for tubercul
osis: at the time, Washington law prohibited women under the age of forty-five who had advanced pulmonary tuberculosis from marrying.32 Betty’s disease was never advanced, but she opted for caution.

  Betty and Don’s courtship was apparently brief. Anne later remarked that she had never met or even heard of Don before the day she came into the kitchen and found Betty sitting with him in the breakfast nook, a celebratory orchid pinned to her lapel. “Meet your new Daddy,” Anne remembered her mother saying by way of introduction.33

  For a time—months or longer—the newlyweds lived alone in a little duplex on a steep hillside near the University of Washington, leaving Anne and Joan with Sydney.34 With one marriage and at least a few other serious relationships behind her, Betty seems to have found in Don a man with whom she could be passionate. Dour though her husband may have been, Betty was happily and fully mated.

  In fall 1942, Betty and Don purchased a home on Vashon Island. The modest cottage hugged the bluff overlooking Dolphin Point, near the ferry dock. They purchased the house and its custom-built pine furniture with no down payment. The house was clad in hand-split cedar shakes and used salvaged ship-decking materials—softer than velvet to the touch—for the wide plank flooring. When the MacDonalds bought the place, there was no road to the property, only a path along the beach and a primitive trail through the woods. Their new home had a view of Mount Rainier, one of Washington’s towering volcanic peaks.

  Anne and Joan were withdrawn from the Seattle public school system and certified for transfer to Vashon. The 15th Avenue house was rented out. Sydney moved in with Mary to help with Mari, Salli, and Heidi.35 Jens was serving as a physician in the navy, leaving Mary to manage his pathology laboratory and run an officers’ canteen with other naval wives.36

  For the Bards, life in the 15th Avenue house was over. For all of them, and especially for Betty, a new chapter was about to begin.

  PLATE 1. Cleve (far left), Betsy (center), and Mary Bard (far right) and friends, Placerville, Idaho, ca. 1910. Private collection.

  PLATE 2. Betty Bard MacDonald’s birthplace, 723 Spruce Street (formerly 725), Boulder, Colorado. Courtesy Boulder Public Library Carnegie Branch for Local History.

  PLATE 3. Cleve (left) and Darsie Bard, ca. 1912. Private collection.

  PLATE 4. Montana School of Mines (top left), Big Butte (marked with letter M), and the Bards’ Westside neighborhood, Butte, Montana. Courtesy Owen Smithers Collection (PH358), Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives.

  PLATE 5. Laurelhurst house, 5120 Northeast 42nd Street (formerly East), Seattle, where the Bards lived from 1918 to 1925, ca. 1937. Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Branch, Washington State Archives.

  PLATE 6. St. Nicholas School students, Seattle, 1919. Betsy Bard, third row, farthest left; Mary Bard, top standing row, third from right. Courtesy Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives, Lakeside School.

  PLATE 7. Blanche Hamilton, ca. 1920. Blanche’s friendship with Betsy was immediate, and her affection for the Bards was lifelong. Courtesy Katy von Brandenfels.

  PLATE 8. Margaret Bundy Callahan, ca. 1924. With Margaret’s friendship came her keen insight into character, and a journalist’s eye. Courtesy Mikell Callahan.

  PLATE 9. Betsy Bard (third from right) and friends in the Laurelhurst years immediately following her father’s death, ca. 1923. Private collection.

  PLATE 10. Betty Bard (left) and Margaret Bundy Callahan, Mount Rainier, ca. 1925. Courtesy Mikell Callahan.

  PLATE 11. Betty and Bob Heskett’s Chimacum house, 2021 Egg and I Road, Chimacum, no date. Their marriage was brief, but Betty’s version of the tale resonated worldwide. Courtesy Jefferson County Historical Society, Photo No. 28.82.

  PLATE 12. Anybody house, 6317 15th Avenue Northeast, Seattle, where the Bard family battled the Great Depression with wit, grit, and one another, 1937. Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Branch, Washington State Archives.

  PLATE 13. Betty’s younger sister, Dede Bard, ca. 1940. Private collection.

  PLATE 14. Betty’s daughters Anne and Joan Heskett, on the back steps of the Anybody house around the time their mother was hospitalized for tuberculosis, ca. 1938. Private collection.

  PLATE 15. Firland Sanitorium, Richmond Highlands, Washington, where Betty Bard overcame tuberculosis. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives, Item No. 2655.

  PLATE 16. Vashon Island house, 11814 Dolphin Point Trail, Vashon, 1938. Betty and her second husband, Donald MacDonald, moved here in 1942, with Betty’s daughters, Anne and Joan. Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Branch, Washington State Archives.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Egged On

  THE little MacDonald house on Vashon clung to the bluff as if held there by incantation. Below the house was a beach, strewn by the sea with massive logs, littered with wet bark and bull kelp. Salt water and creosote-coated wood perfumed the beach, and in the house, the crackling woodstove and the ever-ready coffee pot scented the small kitchen, engendering a sense of calm, of home.

  In 1944, with the whole world at war, a red-haired, thirty-seven-year-old woman sat in the house at the kitchen table, her fingers clacking across typewriter keys. The story she was writing would make her and her family and the house and all their houses famous. The words she wrote told a version of her life story, but they did more: when published one year later, they gave a world saturated with loss and destruction and death something to laugh about. They gave a world that had been holding its breath permission to exhale.

  Vashon Island lies in Puget Sound, seventeen miles southwest of Seattle’s waterfront. Over time, attempts to link the island to the mainland by bridge have failed: islanders do not want the casual contact such easy access would afford.1 In Betty’s day, Vashon’s economy was agricultural, with a climate ideal for berry farms and commercial flower production. Vashon is where Betty MacDonald wrote The Egg and I, the book that catapulted her onto the public stage.

  “Certainly when I was crouched in my kitchen on Vashon Island writing The Egg I didn’t dream that I was oozing out a best seller,” Betty reflected in an article for the Washington Alumnus. “The most I hoped for was to get the damn thing finished and published so that I wouldn’t have to move off the Island because I had told so many people on the ferry that I was writing a book and that every publisher in New York was fighting to get it.”2

  In interviews and at book signings, Betty was endlessly asked how Egg was hatched. The minutiae of the book’s creation—the war in Europe and Japan still raging, rain lashing the windows of the little house, Don rising early to muddle down the muddy path from home to ferry dock bound for work, Anne and Joan coaxed out the door to school, another cup of coffee poured, another cigarette lit and gratefully inhaled, and finally, settling at the typewriter—eventually faded, smoothed into something honed and easily recounted. Betty unfailingly gave credit to Mary for needling, encouraging, and prodding the book into existence. “Are you going to spend all your life washing your sheets by hand, or are you going to make fifty thousand dollars a year writing?” Mary supposedly asked.3 She had a friend, Henri Verstappen, who was the West Coast editor for Doubleday, Doran and Company, and was in Seattle looking for new authors. Mary told him that Betty was working on a book about the Pacific Northwest: she was refining stories she’d told about her years in Chimacum into a manuscript, using the working title The Egg and I. Betty had started this project before she met Don MacDonald, as an attempt to distract herself from the emotional aftermath of what she later described as a failed love affair.4 When Betty’s romance with Don blossomed, she set the writing project aside.

  If Betty’s attention had wandered from the book project, her sister’s had not. Dispatched by Mary, Betty met with Verstappen, who gave her a day to pull an outline of the book together. Betty, in a panic, called in sick to work to do so. Verstappen liked it. He told her to send it to Doubleday, Doran, and to proceed with The Egg and I. Betty was fired for falsely calling in sick, and started working on the book in earnest.5

  Betty sent Doubleday
, Doran the outline, and then the opening chapters of The Egg and I, written in diary form. She also included one of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories she had told to Anne and Joan, a tale she called “Patsy, Who Would Not Take a Bath.” Verstappen was encouraging, but since he was constantly on the road, months went by without Betty’s hearing from him. Finances forced her to take a job, and work on The Egg and I lagged.

  In late 1943, Verstappen left Doubleday, Doran and sent the Egg chapters and “Patsy” back. Betty stopped working on the book, but, as she later told the radio personality George Fisher, Mary “high-pressured me to go ahead and finish it.” Asked if she’d written anything before Egg, Betty replied that she’d sent a couple of short stories to the New York literary agency Brandt & Brandt. “They were interested, but they sent back the stories asking me to make about 100 percent revision! So I put them away in a drawer too—but then when I finished The Egg and I, I remembered Brandt & Brandt and sent the manuscript to them. And after that everything happened so fast I’m still a little hazy on the details.”6

  Betty sent Brandt & Brandt her detailed outline of The Egg and I in February 1944, telling them that the manuscript was nearly finished, that she also had a draft of a book about her time at Firland, and that she’d completed eight Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories.7 She later joked, “In my eagerness to prove that I wasn’t a stinking old one book author I made it sound a little as though we had to wade through old manuscripts to go from room to room in our log house, and that I was a veritable artesian well of the written word.”8