Charles Olson to Morgans, March 26, 1947 -- "I ate yr praise like the child I am"

I find most of Charles Olson's poetry bewildering, but his letters are wonderful. He took a liking to my folks when he met them in 1945, probably through their mutual friend Howard Daniel. My mom took two of his favorite early author photos, including the one below. It sounds as though it was used in the first edition of Call Me Ishmael, though I've never seen a copy so I can't be sure. 

George Bush, a Black man, settled in what is now Washington state in 1844s. He was a founder of the town of  Centralia, and he and his prosperous farm were resources for many of the settlers who arrived in the next decades. Murray and Rosa had hoped to write a novel based on his life.

Much of the Olson/Morgan correspondence is in the archives at the University of Connecticutt.
 

Western people: 

We are so very excited this once at least to have got THE PIX used that I am skimming off to you the News this moment it is on the street. We think it looks wonderful and prove R & H the tame, stupid folk we've thought so far. Don't you? Like the review, too, no?

Charles Olson -- Rosa Morgan photo

Yr letter was a joy, and I ate yr praise like the child I am, going back again for more. I don' suppose one ever gets again this silly, giddy delight of a first book. Yesterday, in a half hour, I learned the Greek alphabet!

Joining you on the west coast was a San Francisco Chronicle job the day the book came out, with emphasis on Pacific man. Which proves what I know. And plans are coming to the boil. The slow pot. Both of us are so hungry to come out and see you in what yr letters make such a Morgan place. I don't know anyone who makes such a scape around themselves as you two do: Patzcuaro, Danube, Jubal Early, Puget Sound. We now have the idea of using the French advance -- if it ever comes: it would cover Greyhound r.t. for 2 at least. Or if a windfall shld spill out of some tree, add it, and buy a car, on the assumption we could sell at a higher price West: accurate? 

I hesitate for one reason only: my New England guilt over work. But in a year and a half I have done so god damned little that staying put does not seem the answer. I merely compound the guilt. The Indian-white-Negro book jumps and halts, jams like a gun which is neither prose nor verse. I guess I shall never take poems (which have kept dropping) as work enough to justify a year. 

Your own projects are very exciting. Is Viewless Winds the labor union tale Howard swears will get you run out of the State? As to the Guggenheim on George Bush, it's a natural, and you should have no trouble nailing one. The customary date for application is October 15, but it occurs to me that you most definitely have a claim on the Post-Service grants they have now added ... 

I feel so certain that a Guggenheim is waiting for you at any time you want it, that another plan suggests itself: the Bush subject is so precise to the narrower interests of the Rosenwald people* that you might be able to double your advantage, get the Rosenwald for this, and hold the Guggenheim for the next idea. Beyond such a suggestion I'm afraid I have no other info on the Rosenwald, didn't know, in fact, that they made grants except for community projects, more or less sociological. Which may be all your way: if you knock off a sharp statement of yr project and ship it to them pronto as inquiry, I think it possible you may break them open. If anyone could, it's you and George Bush!

Am I right that old Dr Will Alexander is the boss of the Rosenwald? Was Manpower head here until the bastards chased him out, (the bastards that are now on top and are turning us into a mondithic fascist state right before our eyes). ( Two phenomenon simultaneous: the huge geological slide of Britain and this nation of ours repeating Europe 30 years ago: Jesus!)

Must quit and ruse Connie to feed the Gloucester monster. Call this a note, and swing us back another. We miss you. Letters help. Big love from us both -- and from Kate. 

Yrs, 

Charles

*The Rosenwald Fund, a project of the philanthropist and Sear Roebuck and Co. co-founder Julius Rosenwald, began officially in 1917. Its primary mission was to provide schools for Black children in the South, as well as housing and workshops. Rosenwald, who was from a Reform Jewish family, admired Booker T. Washington and saw him as a mentor for projects of advancements and self-reliance. He persuaded other wealthy whites to join him in building schools and providing supplies, teacher salaries and teacher housing.

The fund also gave direct grants to individuals involved in cultural work. Most of them were Black, including Marian Anderson, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, Gordon Parks, Rita Dove, and Julian Bond's father. A few went to non-Black scholars working on projects relating to African-American history. Presumably Charlie thought Murray might qualify for one of those. That didn't happen.

 

Writing reminders

 

 

Murray kept these quotes pinned up -- moving them over and over among the other thumb-tacked memorabilia for more than 40 years -- above his writing desk. I've absorbed them by osmosis since childhood. I credit them for any humanity and engagement that shows up in my writing, and I blame John Muir for my difficulties in sticking to the point.

 

 

Murray to Henry Victor Morgan, 21 October 1942 -- "dealing in beauty"

 Dear Dad…

We’ve added another lake to the long list the Romur has been on. After Chirchester Harbor, the Neckar, the Danube, the Ilz, the Sava, Puget Sound, the Quinault, the Hoquiam and the Columbia now comes Xochimilco… in many ways it was the most beautiful of them al

Remember the story in the Oz books about the runaway island.The one that wanted to go places and see things. There was a time when Xochimilco was full of runaway islands, floating gardens of vegetables and flowers. It all began back before the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. The lake was big then, and shallow. On its shores lived the Aztec Indians. Many of them built their houses on poles set out over the water. Later these people, deprived of gardens by neighbors who moved in behind them, built barges, loaded them with dirt, and planted crops. Gradually they got to building bigger and bigger barges, some big enough to hold little thatched huts in addition to the crops. When an Indian got tired of his view, he just poled his little floating island to another part of the lake.

Kayaking at Xochimilco: flowers, corn and anchoring poplars

This got confusing, and it was especially bad when a storm came up and blew the islands all over the lake and the Indians had to paddle around in the dugouts, hunting for home and getting in big arguments over whether their garden really was full of spinach or orchids, cabbages or gardenias. So they began to tie the islands to trees, or to ground them on shoals and plant trees so that they wouldn’t move away. And from a lake of floating islands Xochimilco became, after a century or two, a town of canals. It is now the Mexican Coney Island, the place to spend a Saturday night or Sunday. The main attraction are the passenger skiffs, flat-bottomed canoes covered with canopies and ringed with flowers, which you can rent for $1 an hour (if you are a tourist) or fifty cents an hour (if you know enough Spanish to argue), complete with a pole pusher…

The scenery is beautiful. The canals flow past the hundreds of islands, now almost—but not
completely—stationary, and on each are stands of eight foot corn, purple kale, pastel green lettuce and celery, and more flowers than you ever saw at any flower show. Everywhere are the anchoring poplar trees and in the distance the purpling range of mountains, capped by Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl, both thousands of feet higher than Rainier.

Our second trip was the better for on it we took the Romur. We put it together at the British Boat Club, to the amazement of the Indian boathouse keeper, who had never seen anything like it, and started out down the canals. Our host, the fifteen year old son of the owner of the place where we are staying, was in a perpetual panic for fear we would lose ourselves in the hundreds of turnoffs. But we just kept paddling straight ahead, or so it seemed, and eventually came back to where we had started.

It was really remarkable paddling, first along a broad canal flanked with the clubhouses of the national rowing clubs: Mexican, Spanish, British, and the German one, closed for the duration. Several four-oared shells were out, warming up for an intra-club race, and while they didn’t look much like the University of Washington, they were pretty as they came swinging along. The slides banging and the oarlocks creaking as the big, bronzed men—some of them with considerable bay windows—slammed into each stroke.

Ruben Jay photo, from gondolagreg.com

Past the rowing course the canal narrowed, and we slipped past little houses, screened by poplars, each with a short canal leading into it, like a driveway. And then came the island gardens, interlaced by literally hundreds of little canals. It was Sunday and not many of the workers were out but there were some: a tall man with a machete, hacking down corn stalks; a boy up a tree, cutting off limbs for firewood; a young man picking flowers and loading them into a boat to paddle over and sell in the tourist section; an old Indian cutting grass with a machete; a young Indian lifting 'Rwater out of a pool and swinging it, in a cloth bag on the end of a pole, over onto his flower garden. We stopped and talked to him, as best we could, and like the flower growers who were at Xochimilco when Cortez came, he felt superior to the vegetable growers because he was dealing in beauty. He told us that if we wanted to see Mexico, we should see the state fair, and, his eyes big, he assured us that they had farm machines on display there from France and Switzerland and England and the United States, machines that could think. …

After awhile we pushed our way back out into the big canal and went on. The Indians were taking flowers over to the market and they came floating past us, pushing their little skiffs with poles and looking very strange indeed, standing up in such little boats. …

We kept paddling along until we ran into a traffic jam down by an amusement park, and then turned around and went home, back past the pig-sty, the cathedral, the low bridges. It was a swell day.

Tomorrow or the next day we are going to run down to Guadalajara for a few days, and we expect to go paddling in Patzcuaro, called the most beautiful lake in the Americas. But we’ve seen Crater Lake, haven’t we. …

Love as ever,

MURROSA

Murray to HVM, 2 January 1925 -- "take me to a show Daddy"

Dear Dear Dear DADDY ... please take me to a show tonight Please Do Daddy Dear. I don't [   ] witch one Daddy just so I go to one. I don't want to see Richard Barthelmess [?] any other but him. Please take me to a show Daddy champeen Morgan Please Please do Daddy. LOOK written buy murray. Please please please please.

 Murray's handwriting did not improve much in subsequent years, although his spelling did.

Tom Mix and Tony

The plea worked. HVM was close to 60 by then and not up to much of playing sports or roughhousing with his 8-year-old son, but he liked spending time with him. He annotated this document in his equally terrible penmanship: "I had told him I would not go but this turned the trick, and we went to Proctor St. Blue Mouse and saw Leather Stockings and Tom Mix and his Wonderful Horse.   --Daddy Champeen Morgan"

With Scoop Jackson at the DNC, 1956 -- a hot day in Chicago

  

Murray is interviewing Henry (Scoop) Jackson, who was three years into his first term as U.S. Senator and 16 years away from his own presidential floor nomination (by Jimmy Carter). He lost that one to George McGovern. 

Anyway, in this case I'm more interested in the showcase of '50s hotel decor and men's clothing -- those drapes, that carpet, Scoop's summer-weight suit and eternal bow tie, Murray's disheveled-reporter get-up, right down to the unshined shoes. The audio guy looks pretty stylish though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

By his last year of broadcasting, Murray was frustrated with "the Senator from Boeing" over his hawkish stance on Vietnam. Just before the 1970 election, he said:

"There is only one state-wide race, for U.S. Senate, and it's a mismatch. The Republicans never entertained serious hopes of unseating Senator Jackson, and when their standard bearer polled fewer votes in the primary than the Democratic runner up, they simply gave up. After all, President Nixon called Jackson his kind of Democrat -- and who's to disagree?"

Scoop set a national record in that election, winning 83.9 percent of the vote over Charles Elicker, a Poulsbo businessman. Elicker was a good sport, making plans for his "defeat party" before the polls opened.

Thurston Griggs to Murray, May 23, 1991 -- "an ikon of antiquity"

Dear Murray,

I perceive that you have become an institution -- a symbol of respectability, reverence for the past, the Pacific Northwest native heritage -- in short an ikon of antiquity and a pillar of culture. Your presence automatically dignifies civic occasions. I'm not trying to be funny; this is a place you have earned, and the community needs it -- perhaps more than they realize. I never thought Edmund Meany suitable for that role; too stiff. You undoubtedly have the humanity and wit to carry it off much more to my satisfaction. Of course William Bonney might have once represented the heritage of bygone days; but I saw three of his vehicular crashes when he was trying to make the transition from buggies to the motor age. He looked pathetic and bewildered on each occasion -- as if to say, "what again? what is the world coming to -- these infernal devices..." I always felt that he never caught up with time and never would.

Too stiff?

A bit bewildered?

Just right? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Murray Morgan and Pioneer Square companions photo by Mary Randlett)

Vaccine vignettes -- Tacoma in the 1920s

Tacoma schoolchildren show off their vaccinations in 1922. credit: Washington State Historical Society

 

Washington state had smallpox outbreaks into the 1940s, and from the 19th century on, they were accompanied by controversy over vaccines. During outbreaks, schoolchildren were required to be vaccinated to attend. Some families refused, including Murray's parents. Perhaps predictably for the founding ministers of The Church of the Healing Christ, they did not believe in vaccination and Murray as a teenager had never received one. Since Rosa and her family were parishioners, neither had she. Granted, there were a lot fewer shots available back then. Smallpox and diphtheria were the main ones in the '20s, though many other less proven vaccines were available.

Murray's parents and his school mate Thurston Griggs's family were on opposite sides of the vaccine disputes.

Murray to Thurston, March 7, 1991

I remember your father as a figure of authority in the community, always DOCTOR Griggs, and somehow a person in opposition to what Our Family stood for. I suspect this memory may stem from a time when my father ran for school board in opposition to a school decision requiring vaccination. My father lost. I was held out of attending Jason Lee for some weeks in the late 1920s because I wasn't vaccinated. (I remember getting in a lot of reading, probably of Edgar Rice Burroughs) I also remember the astonishment of the doctor in 1942 when Rosa ... and I were getting shots before going to South America when he found we had not been vaccinated at all. We were given a powerful panoply of vaccines and then the draft board would only let us go to Mexico. ("You must not get water between us" -- at a time before the Pan-Am highway reached beyond San Cristobal de las Casas.)

Thurston's father was a vaccine proponent, to the point of giving out "cold vaccine injections" during the 1918 flu pandemic, despite that fact that no actual flu (or cold) shot existed then. Thurston's older brother Joseph Jr., who became a physician himself, wrote about his early experiences going on calls with his father. Joe was 10 when he started driving him around town.

When the great flu epidemics of 1918-19 occurred. Dad was severely overworked. He believed that giving a series of cold vaccine injections might prevent the flu, so we were all given shots. When Dad finally got home for supper, he would find our living room full of families from the neighborhood, catching him for their shots. Many kids made such a fuss about the approaching needle that Dad would often have one of us come out and take a shot in front of everybody, and show that it didn't hurt enough to make a fuss about.  

Schools were closed during the flu epidemic, and the hospitals were overflowing. Church basements were commandeered or volunteered as emergency hospitals. Dad asked me if I would like to learn to drive the car and be his chauffeur for his calls so that he could get some rest between visits. I already knew our city of about 70,000 population because I had a job delivering curtains for a curtain laundry and drugs for a pharmacy. Dad would tell me the next address and then he would fall asleep sitting in the back seat of the Model T Ford sedan. Upon arrival, I awakened him and he made his call. When he came out the procedure was repeated.

Once they got their first shots in 1942, my folks never looked back. Since we traveled a lot, I got vaccinated for exotics (to us) such as yellow fever as well as the standard regimes of the '50 and '60s.

 

Miss Kershaw's raspberries -- "a taste I can conjure in the dead of winter"

 

I have an exuberant stand of golden raspberries in the alley behind my house, all mixed up with burgundy clematis. People strolling down the alley often stop for a snack and I have given starts to several neighbors. The berries are fragile, not suitable for packing and shipping, so you won't see them in stores. And they have a story:

When they were in their 70s, Thurston Griggs and Murray, who had been junior high and high school classmates in Tacoma, started corresponding.

Murray to Thurston Griggs

July 28 '91

Dear Thurston...

Do you remember Jessie Kershaw, Miss Kershaw, who taught dancing in the studio above Roberts Brothers store at Division and I? Tennis champion of Tacoma around 1901? President of the Tacoma Humane Society, who used to picket rodeos? Had a house full of cats and cat crap and a pair of old hunting dogs, Guy and Scamp, who fought as a team, one grabbing the other dog's right front paw, the other going for the throat? Probably not; certainly not all that. Those are my memories of her because she lived two doors north of us on Eye street in a big gray house with horse chestnuts on the parking strip, a hitching posts, too, still in place, and a Secret Garden of a yard with the first, and biggest Japanese cutleaf maple of my memory and two shiny barked cherry trees, one Bing, the other Royal Anne, which we could pick and give her half, or raid when we knew she was out walking the dogs. Along the alley behind the house she had a row of raspberry bushes, very bushy, so that by crouching we could pick them without being seen from her kitchen window. Most of them were yellow raspberries, which have a distinctive taste, a taste I can conjure in the dead of winter. A taste I used to think about when walking the snowdrifts in Massacre Alley on Attu. I told Mrs. Kershaw about that when I came home after the war and when she heard that Rosa and I had bought our place at Trout Lake she came over to Dad's house with a dozen rooted plants and gave them to me, saying "I just want you to have the pleasure of watching little boys steal them."

I'm just in from our backyard where the raspberries are growing behind the vegetable patch and in front of the acre or so of second growth doug fir, alder and cottonwood that has grown up since this place was logged about 1910. The bushes haven't been cared for, except for putting grass clippings on the bed in the fall, and they don't get a proper amount of sun, what with the trees and the fact that we are on the north slope of North Hill which is the equivalent of Al Capp's Lower Slobovia, but they are still bearing after all this time and are one of the few things that taste as good as I remember things tasting 70 years ago. 

best,

Murray

Miss Kershaw's given name was actually Dorothy. (In her private life she was Mrs. Mylne Keena.) Her mother had been a drama and dance instructor at Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, which helps explain both her own career as a dance instructor and her place in the traditionalist wing of Tacoma society. Well-brought-up young Tacomans of the 1920s put on their patent leather shoes, climbed the stairs to her studio upstairs in the Roberts Brothers building, and learned to waltz.

Although his mom (whose stepfather had been Chief Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court) might have liked the idea, Murray was not one of Miss Kershaw's students. Thurston was, however, and he hated it:

"Miss Kershaw was a nemesis to me because I was consigned to her dancing class, and those were the most readily expendable days of my childhood. How I resented that! For one thing, my older brother had rebelled completely; he said it was 'sissy stuff' and no red-blooded western man needed that frilly affectation. But our folks were intent on bringing us up as gentlemen and ladies in the Eastern tradition. We had to wear white gloves; patent leather special-purpose shoes (that hurt); special clothes; special combing of the hair; preliminary bathing. We lined up on opposite sides of that prison on top of Roberts Brothers, boys on one side and girls on the other, and, after a demonstration of how to do it, we were to choose partners. Oh, it was painful! I used to wait as long as possible before choosing, because I didn't want any partner anyway. Besides, I didn't want to convey the impression that I might have a favorite. Beth Pascoe seemed to have the same attitude as me, so often I would find her last to be chosen and I would pick her, so that we could suffer together. I'll swear that she used to groan and mutter, and I used to interpret that not so much as a response to me personally as to the entire process. We had to hold our hands just so; stand just so far apart. Then of course we had to watch the couples who performed best, presumably in adulation of their skill. Miss Kershaw was so "pat" with it all, that it seemed to me she was doing it in her sleep. Eventually I feigned illness so frequently that my mother gave up...