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.

 

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

War Correspondence -- Warren Magnuson to Rosa, 1967

 Rosa was a bit disappointed, though also proud, when I decided on Stanford for college. She had hoped I would commute from Trout Lake to the University of Washington, which certainly would have saved  money. Failing that, she favored Swarthmore. I liked the idea of Reed, far enough to be out of the parental eye and close enough to come home often, but she had heard bad things about the atmosphere there. I don't remember Murray voicing an opinion. (Probably my main reason for choosing Stanford, about which I knew basically nothing, was that my high school guidance counselor had told me not to bother applying there, and I wasn't about to take that lying down.) 

Once we agreed that I was Palo Alto bound, she took note of the several students there whose fathers were officials in the Johnson Administration. She said if I happened to meet Dean Rusk, or Robert McNamara, or Melvin Laird, I was to explain to them the folly of the Vietnam War. Looking back, I'm pretty sure she was joking. As a very earnest 17-year-old, however, I felt burdened by the responsibility of reversing U.S. foreign policy. 

For her part, Mom did her best through letter writing. This response from Sen. Warren Magnuson strikes me now as a relic of a bygone age. Though he was wrong in his support and his predictions, he actually engaged with the topic. Though he was a Democrat defending a Democratic president, he did not disparage the other party. And at letter's end he left open the possibility that his views might change. 

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.

 

Lockdown notes from 1944 -- "My bonnie ambivalent bivalve"

Staying at home during COVID-19 times gave me more time to spend with the family correspondence. In many ways, these letters seem from a different world, but some challenges of being cooped up sounded familiar. 

Murray spent a year and change posted to the Aleutian Islands in World War II, as a cryptographer and correspondence censor. He got there in the spring of 1944, and though the Aleutian chain is famously wet and windy, he spent much of his time off hiking and bird watching. He preferred working graveyard, which gave him more daylight hours outside. 

When not fogged in, the views were great.

Come winter, of course, all that changed. Wind squalls became blizzards. Just suiting up to get from the communal Pacific huts (basically a Quonset built of wood rather than steel) to the mess hall took a good twenty minutes with the Army-issue cold-weather gear of that era. Then you crawled through a snow tunnel to the surface and skittered across the snow crust to your destination, occasionally on all fours. Most huts kept a stash of food for times when they would burn more calories getting to a meal than they could take in once they got there. One of the many hazards of walking around on winter nights, was tripping over the chimneys of the buried huts. And there is a lot of winter night above the 50th parallel.

Chimneys were tripping hazards.

The huts had 16 x 36 feet of floor space and housed up to nine men apiece. Since hut assignments were not made by shift schedules, someone was pretty much always trying to sleep during someone else's time off. You could listen to the radio, at low volume; you could talk, likewise quietly; you could play cards. You could drink, if there was a beer issue or you could afford gray market hard liquor, but then you had to consider the certainty of navigating back up the slippery tunnel to the latrines or at least to the snow.


Murray spent most of his hut confinement reading, and writing letters or articles. He wrote almost daily to Rosa, and one way to chart the procession of dark months is to look at his salutations. Back in boot camp and his first island posting, on Adak in the spring, most of the letters started with variations on Dearest Nunny, My darling, Nunny darling, and the occasional Little Lover. By the time he reached Attu, at the western extreme of the Aleutians and the last months of his tour, he had branched out. Here's a selection:

My willowy one,

My quiet curassow,

O most delectable,

My Hemingway hating honey,

My pleasant capybara,

My incredibly loved infant,

My delectable darling

My wonderful wapiti

My passionate ptarmigan,

My adorable apple pie,

My favorite photographer,

My luscious little one,
My weird little watermelon,

Hello bodacious and beloved,
Allo my quaint little cabbage,

My cool charmant,

My bonnie ambivalent bivalve,

My pretty piltzer,    
My consummately constructed consort,

      

and in the last few weeks  before he was sent back to Seward on the mainland where she could join him (posing as his sister)

            My soon to be rejoined Rosita.

When she wrote to him she called him Butch.

Henry Victor Morgan -- Whitman, Chickens, and a New Age Vision

My grandfather Henry Victor Morgan died when I was two. I met him, but I didn't know him. I do know that he was a big fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (whom Murray called "dad's shaggy hero"). Henry Victor, or HVM, was born in 1865, so Emerson and Whitman, although not age mates, were both still active when he was a young man. He thought of them as living influences rather than historical figures. He was friends with Ezra Meeker, of Oregon Trail fame, which brings home how compressed the history of white people is in this part of the world.

HVM's and Adda's church at Division and North J in Tacoma            

HVM was a prolific writer, poet, and lecturer, mostly on metaphysical topics that I find hard to follow. He preached at his home church in Tacoma, the Church of the Healing Christ (now the Center for Spiritual Living, and reached an international audience through his monthly magazine, The Master Christian. 

 

Every now and then he wrote something I can latch on to.This is part of an diary entry that came into the hands of my friend and HVM appreciator, Jeff Margolis. I don't know if my grandfather ever published it.                                                                                                             

Two letters from Murray to Lane, 1967 and 1975

I lived mostly in California from 1967 through 1975, which meant I got letters from home. Reading them later, my main impression is how many different things my folks found interesting--politics, architecture, photography, theater, horse racing--and what an avid eavesdropper Murray was. I have inherited his pleasure in the overheard snippet of talk.

[Nov. 5, 1967]

Sunday

Dear daughter-type...

Sorry I missed your phone call on Thursday, though the big widge gave me the good reports, and I trust filled you in on the way things are going here. The snow started just as we got home from the weekend in Vancouver; the first flakes showing up in the Barnard Cadillac headlights as we were going through Seattle and the snow just starting to be visible as we came into our driveway. It was deep and beautiful and it lasted three days. We didn't have a chance to enjoy it, though, because Rosa had a cold and maybe the flu for the whole week, while I was running some kind of low grade virus and though on my feet had no extra energy at all. 

A. L. "Slim" Rasmussen. 

The election campaign here is moving into the final days with everybody sore at everybody: Slim [Rasmussen] at the Manager, the press, the old council, the federal government, the Puget Sound Governmental Conference and targets of opportunity; the Manager at Slim, at those who don't support the Council Manager form enough, at the guys who write the ads for the Trib, and at the crooks for being overactive at a time when the Good Guys are campaigning on their accomplishments in cleaning up the town. I find Slim a classic demagogue and the council members too couth to give him real battle. I can't guess at all how the voting will go on Tuesday night. (The station hasn't asked me to broadcast the results.)

Rosa says she told you about taking Lyla rpt Laila to the psychedelic play at the Off Center last week. [Laila Pearne was the widow of Murray's half-brother Harrison.] The play was a bit embarrassing even for graduates of Daniel-Ostransky Academy [Howard Daniel and LeRoy Ostransky were among Murray and Rosa's most profane friends.] It was like an inexpert version of Homecoming, with a light show thrown in; and attending it with Laila was something like taking Aunt Millie to a brothel. [The production was Christopher, by UW Drama graduate student Clarence Morley. It was billed as the world's first psychedelic play.] The only things she asked about on the way home, though, was why the couple had made love under an American flag in the closing scene...

Vancouver was fine. We had tea at the Bon Ton, a bacon and mushroom sandwich at Clancy's (which has changed names again but not personnel), a bottle of Canadian whiskey at our rooms at the Georgian Towers, a dinner at the roof-restaurant ... and a fine time at the zoo, though we couldn't see Skana [the orca who inspired the creation of Greenpeace] from underwater this time since she put her head thru the window last week and was cut up a bit and the pool level is not being kept low while unbreakable glass is installed -- and high time, I'd say. From above she looked fine, and smiled when fed. The Humuhumu apaapa nuanua went swimming by; the polar bears were wrestling each other happily and breathing clouds; the hornbills hopped and gave us the separate eye; the penguins looked pleased with themselves, and one wagged a literally frozen fanny at us, making the icicles shatter. ...

We have a big week coming up. Tomorrow (Monday) there is a rally of [Eugene] McCarthy types at the library. Sally Goldmark is to speak. Tuesday, beside the election, there is a talk at PLU by Agnes de Mille (I'll try to get your book autographed). Wednesday night the Seattle Rep opens THE FATHERS by Strindberg with Pauline [Flanagan] in the leading role. Thursday the University of Washington is putting on Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons (it's about a crisis in Jefferson's career) and there is earlier a Stanford Mothers' program that Rosa will attend if not teaching. Friday, the Off Center is offering three one-actors including Kraft's Last Tape by Beckett. Saturday there's a party at Ostranskys to celebrate their new Danish table. Sunday, thank god, is blank; but there may be a good movie available.

...

Love,

father-type

 

Slim Rassmussen (his twin brother was known as "Fat" Rasmussen) won in a landslide, unseating Harold Tollefson and beginning one of the weirder periods in twentieth-century Tacoma government

Sunday

en pleine aire

near SeaTac

(May 1975?)

Darling daughter

Turnagain Arm. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Anchorage was 70,000 when we saw it [in 1965] and claims 170,000 now. It's changing but the change is all in the same old direction. It's an ugly smarmy, grasping place, radiating ineptness, set apart and festering in the austere distances of Alaska. The scenery really is grand: even mud flats are beautiful if they approach being endless. The view from the Top of the World as Turnagain Arm goes from blue to gold to pewter to black makes the International Modern forgivable. But the only really pleasant buildings downtown are out by the point in the shadow of the henshitbrown Captain Cook. One white clapboard two-story has a Historic Marker plaque; it was built in 1915. (I'll get a plaque next) and it's the oldest building in town. ...

 

I was up to talk to the Alaska Press Women about the Hegg photos. I was the banquet speaker at the end of a two day meeting devoted to communicating thru photographs. It was bit of a botch. The woman who had arranged the session came down with whooping heaves, an efficient harridan from Valdez took over with atrocious efficiency and kept everything going ein, zwei, drei up until the banquet at which she was too drunk to present the awards, turning that function over to a blue-haired lady who was too drunk to know that she was too drunk to present the awards. If giving somebody the wrong scroll is good material for repetitive gag comedy, this was classic. 

E. A. Hegg, a Bellingham-based photographer, chronicled the Yukon gold rush. "One Man's Gold Rush," Murray's book about him and his work, was published in 1968.

There was a lot of charm to it though. One of the Eskimo women who skinned seals in Fairbanks got two awards for "special feature" writing. She said she was "walking on feathers."

Two young --(sort of)--women who make up 2/3rds of the editorial staff of the Kodiak paper won twelve awards between them, and hope it will impress their boss who is under pressure because they've been quoting police blotter reports directly and the mayor thinks it makes the city look silly. (I said "sort of" young because one has an 11 year old son. She is very tall and serious as Buster Keaton.) They both feel overworked, underpaid and uncertain how they could be so lucky. But they'd like a year in a big city.

Of the Anchorage people the most interesting was a skinny blonde photographer named Nancy Simmerman who has sailed her own ketch up from California, and specializes in wilderness scenes. Her feeling for rock and flower textures approaches Johsel's. She was able to hold my attention for an hour while talking about light angles; it helped that she doesn't use filters, and never mentioned shutter speed. She kept saying underexpose for warmth.

...

I find myself turning out copy easily and quickly about the Puget Sound area and hope to have a finished ms on the southern sound region ready for the Press by the start of fall semester. It would be a sort of south forty version of Skid Road: what happened downstream from Seattle. I hope I can finish it before my confidence wavers.

...

I saw a rather corny documentary that recreates Athabascan legends. One scene shows man and woman rising and taking form from boiling, seething mud. It was a low budget production and I asked how they could afford such elaborate effects. He said it was easy. They made man and woman out of wax, then photographed them under heat till they became puddles and played creation backwards. Maybe that's how the Voice of America should do programs on Vietnam: from Vietnamization thru Americanization to peasant revolution.

---------

One good thing about writing a letter on the plane is that I don't have to think about the mound of clippings, xerox stuff, and other detritus on the coffee table awaiting forwarding. Things like Stanford's offer of good tickets for WASH-STAN, or USC-STAN, USC being a dollar cheaper, Odd pictures of colts. Winning pictures of Foolish Pleasure. Quotes from Bill Russell: "That man Gray wouldn't walk around a bear." Sad clips from Yugoslavia. Reviews on Erika Jong. Clips from Emmett [Watson]. Also one from Denny [MacGougan]: The chief orphan from Vietnam is seeking to lease Peron's mansion from the Argentine government. He wants to see if Thieu can live as cheaply as Juan. ...

Things at school have worked out so that I shall teach a Tacoma history class as well as NW. It will really be an extension of PNW into the 20th Century: public power, the progressive movement, civic reform movements. Where did we go wrong? 

Back to Anchorage: while waiting for the airport bus in the lobby I heard two Rasmussen looking types with wedding bands on their fat little fingers arguing in Dutch about petrol and dollars--the only words I understood. Two Eskimo kids, 7 and/or 8, brother/sister maybe, were arguing about food. "Yeah, you say tastes like banana but you never tasted no banana, not never." A black in pork pie and shades came in to announce to nobody in particular, "Just flew in from Valdez. Hot enough over there to brown my ass." Mothers, all in pastels, some carrying plastic iris, others real carnations paraded past to the Glorious Mothers Day Brunch.

...

Buckle your seat belts

We are about to attempt to land,

Murray