Sextant Volume XV, Spring 2007.

SEXTANT The Journal of Salem State College 

Spring 2007

Volume XV, No. 1

Note & editor’s

acknowledgments

President Nancy D. Harrington ’60 Vice President of Academic Affairs Diane Lapkin Dean of the Graduate School Marc Glasser Editor Patricia Johnston, Art Editorial Board Susan Case, Biology Susan Edwards, Archives Sandra Fowler, Communications Heidi Fuller, Sport, Fitness and Leisure Maureen McRae, Nursing Ellen Rintell, Education Leah Ritchie, Management J.D. Scrimgeour, English Stephen Young, Geography Design & Production of Volume XV, No. 1 Susan McCarthy, Publications Photography Kim Mimnaugh, Art SSC Foundation Board Officers Jacob S. Segal, Chair John C. Pastore ’94, President Frank J. Sparicio ’53, Vice President Michael J. Eschelbacher, Treasurer Patricia H. Zaido, Secretary

Sextant is published by the faculty of Salem State College.

Opinions expressed by writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect College policy.

Copyright © 2007 Salem State College 352 Lafayette Street Salem, MA 01970-5353 Telephone: 978-542-6488 Email: pjohnston@salemstate.edu www.salemstate.edu/sextant

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his fifteenth volume of the Sextant includes articles that illuminate our region and our time. The first two articles discuss aspects of the richness of community and culture on the North Shore. Julie Whitlow reflects on how history informs present life in the Salem Willows, and compares Salem’s gothic qualities and its tight-knit community to the New Orleans of her childhood. Jay McHale talks about a different community—one brought together by music for over two decades—in his article on the Peabody jazz club Lennie’son-the-Turnpike, which was in its heyday in the 1960s.

The second theme in this issue is education. Eileen Margerum brings to life the Brownies, early twentieth-century illustrated figures who taught children about geography, occupations, and manners. Cleti Cervoni looks at contemporary pedagogy in the elementary science classroom, where personal dynamics often discourage participation by girls. In her art portfolio, Maureen Creegan Quinquis comments on how the current trend toward more and frequent evaluation in the schools often neglects personal growth and ultimately results in less effective education.

This issue of the Sextant also features other arts, in Bill Coyle’s award winning poetry and Kristine Doll’s interpretation of a traditional Jamaican folk tale.

Many people have been involved in the planning and production of this year’s Sextant. The Editorial Board carefully read and commented on all submissions.

For the illustrations, we thank Susan Edwards, the college archivist, who helped select the images by Walter Rowen used to illustrate McHale’s article.

She sorted through the papers and photographs donated to the archives by Lennie Sogoloff; we also thank the Sogoloff family for allowing us to reproduce additional photographs from their personal collection. For Cervoni’s article, we thank Dr. Margaret Howard, Principal, and Joan Iannaccone of the Saltonstall School in Salem, for facilitating access to the science classrooms where photographer Kim Mimnaugh took her creative illustrations. Piyapat (JuneBug) Raitim ’07 and Matthew Strommer ’08 created the drawings for The Mermaid of Pondside; we thank Mark Malloy of the Art Department for once again working with students in his illustration course to produce such imaginative images.

The dynamic look of the Sextant is the result of the hard work of the Publications Department at Salem State College, particularly designer Susan McCarthy, who has done an exceptional job of planning and executing the layout. Susan and I wish to thank the many people on campus who have aided us: Joyce RossiDemas, David Petrie, Rose Cooke, Roland Ricard, and Kris Cowles. Many departments are involved in the Sextant’s production and distribution: Academic Affairs, the Graduate School, College Relations, Fiscal Affairs, Institutional Advancement, Mail Services, Purchasing, and Shipping and Receiving. Susan Case and Eileen Margerum graciously proofread the final copy and Scott Prewitt and the staff at the Imperial Company are responsible for the excellent printing.

The support of the SSC administration has been crucial in providing time and resources. I thank Vice President Diane Lapkin, Deans Anita V. M. Shea and Marc Glasser, and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Amie Marks Goodwin. This Sextant is the last one produced under the leadership of President Nancy Harrington, who is retiring on June 30 after seventeen years as president. The entire staff of the Sextant thanks her for her continued support over all of that time.

—Patricia Johnston

Sextant encourages readers to submit letters or comments to:

Sextant Salem State College 352 Lafayette Street Salem, MA 01970-5353 pjohnston@salemstate.edu Please include your name, address, phone number, and email address.

Letters may be published and edited according to available space.

SEXTANT

Spring 2007

Volume XV, No. 1

E S S A Y Shelter from the Storms: The Essence of Community in the Salem Willows 2 Julie Whitlow Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike 11 Jay McHale Beyond Access: Girls and School Science 30 Cleti A. Cervoni From Folklore to Popular Culture: A Brief History of The Brownies Eileen Margerum

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Maureen Creegan Quinquis

P O R T F O L I O D None of the Above Maureen Creegan Quinquis

F O L K T A L E The Mermaid of Pondside Kristine Doll

The Education Ladder

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P O E T R Y

Piyapat (JuneBug) Raitim ’07

From The God of This World to His Prophet Bill Coyle

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B O O K S H E L F Recent books by faculty and staff

Inside back cover

On the cover: Under the Normal Curve, acrylic, ink, graphite on paper by Maureen Creegan Quinquis (See page 23).

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E S S A Y

Shelter from the Storms: The Essence of Community in the Salem Willows Julie Whitlow

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After the “Big One”

ew Orleans, my hometown, and Salem, the only Just as masked horsemen in sequined clothes and cosplace that I have lived longer, may not seem very tumed riders throwing beads and trinkets to adoring similar at first glance. Both, however, are places crowds are part of New Orleans at Mardi Gras, headless whose glorious pasts guide the present. Although separated and bloody creatures, witches’ balls, and the reenactment by geography and culture, both have had prestigious ports, of unfortunates being hanged or pressed to death with influential literary lineages, stones are part of Salem at lively local politics, lovely old Halloween. Like most places The New Orleans of my childhood is architecture, famous seafood, alive with memory, in both now gone. It was lost when generations New Orleans and Salem a and annual festivals tied to pagan rituals transformed by history binds the neighof human error, malaise, and corruption, shared Christianity. Both borhoods to create the elusive have shaky recoupled with environmental destruction, concept of “community.” lationships to The New Orleans of my led to the unimaginable. the superchildhood is now gone. It was natural, lost when generations of human error, malaise, and corand voodoo and witches have permeruption, coupled with environmental destruction, led to ated the thoughts of generations of the unimaginable. On August 29, 2005, levees built on residents. Both also thrive on tourist sand began to crumble as hurricane Katrina fed on steamy industries that accentuate the absurd.

Gulf waters warmed by human excess. The result was the loss of everything left of my childhood. My family’s home sat swirling for 14 days in the stew of brackish water from

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lake and swamp, mixed with the sludge and blood and fetid waste that bubbled over and under the city’s feeble fortifications. Almost every photograph and relic are lost, sitting in the mold, waiting for the wrecking crew to haul it off. During a recent visit, I said goodbye to my childhood home for the last time.

This week, a Baptist volunteer youth group will hurl onto the street all of the photos that captured what my youth must have been like. They will haul out onto the pyre my grandmother’s piano, my mother’s collection of carved birds, the Kachina dolls from the southwest, my father’s cameras, my brother’s rowing trophies. Altruistic kids who believe that God deals us the hand we deserve will toss my father’s beloved books onto the heap, the ones that he brought back from Paris long ago, spines once lined up in gilded unison. And they will take what’s left of my mother’s heart and place most of it on the top of the pile, leaving her a few pulsing fragments to remind her of what once was.

Aside from the tangibles, gone are the individuals who made up New Orleans’ vibrant communities, now either displaced or departed. The fabric of the city and any hope of its revival lies in the renewal of the wasted neighborhoods. Names roll easily off the tip of my tongue: Lakeview, Gentilly, the Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth, Chalmette, Lake Terrace, Lake Vista, Bucktown.

They are all vast expanses of rot and rubble, lost to nostalgia and memory. I can recall in a blur of fondness the smell of rain on the hot pavement, the thrills of surfing down the levee on a piece of cardboard, the feel of thick algae under my toes on the Lake Pontchartrain seawall. I can see the neighbors old and young whose idiosyncratic ways and words made them an integral part of New Orleans.

There were Miss Amie and Little Amie, who cremated their dog Amber and put the ashes in the spice rack.

“Miss Calkie,” Jack Daniels on her breath, wept at my accomplishments and regaled me with stories of her

Photographs of Julie Whitlow’s family home after it was gutted of its contents.

The symbols on the door, above, indicate that the house had been inspected on 9-20-05 and that no dead bodies were found. Photos by Cornelia M. Whitlow, Julie’s mother.

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“white trash” background. Irma Klein gave me Barq’s root beer on hot summer nights, bought me birthday underwear at D. H. Holmes, and made novenas to the Mother of Perpetual Help that I would “turn out right, for Gawd’s sake.”

Yolanda Loup and I would scale the seawall at the London Canal and look for Mardi Gras trinkets and other washed up treasures on the banks of the murky water below. I know that I have been shaped by all of these individuals, but the only pictures that I have left are what I can conjure in words.

With the whir of jet engines, I return to the Salem Willows, my current neighborhood, and my only home now. I ponder it with a new sense of reverence as the rhythms of life ebb and flow with the tides.

My New Orleans is gone; the “Big One” finally came and the neighborhoods were lost. Only ghosts live there now.

But my Salem is still alive and reckoning with its own past, and looking toward the future. With a new sense of fatalism, I seek to understand that elusive concept of community.

Like New Orleans and its vibrant neighborhoods forged over time, Salem’s history and geography have converged in one neighborhood called the Salem Willows. I have begun to believe that community occurs not only because people who live in close proximity to each other try to get along, but also because they understand implicitly the historical and natural forces that have created the places that they hold dear.

New Orleans was a volatile place to build a city over 300 years ago, situated at the bottom of a bowl surrounded by the fury of the Mississippi River, the vastness of Lake Pontchartrain, and the multitude of inlets, canals, and bayous draining water in and out in every direction. But the human psyche, then and now, seems to relish living close to large and dangerous bodies of water. Coastal populations continue to grow perilously close to oceans and beaches, defying the challenges that storms and surges almost certainly will bring.

It is this historical battling of elements that inspires interdependence and community.

The Salem Willows: A Community Begins

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he Salem Willows was built in tandem with a park sited in proximity to the sea and its respite. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Salem Willows hosted a restful sanitarium, numerous hotels, and a row of restaurants that thrived on summer visitors. Gorman’s summer theatre pleased the throngs with vaudeville acts; balloon ascensions, bonfires, and parachute jumps satisfied thrill seekers. The Willows Pavilion boasted a roller skating rink with a live orchestra on the ground floor and a 300seat restaurant on the second. Regulars came back year after year to escape the heat and grit of neighboring mill towns and while away leisurely days by the sea.

Adjacent to the park, a lovely and vibrant neighborhood, originally called Juniper Point, began as a summer tenting ground. By the late 1880s, successful mill owners from Lawrence and Lowell replaced their tents with twostory cottages. After World War II, the Willows neighborhood became a year-round community with the Juniper School at its center.

Souvenirs from a trip to Paris and a silver dollar given to Julie as a child were items salvaged from the hurricane debris.

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Turn-of-the-century postcards of hotels and restaurants from Pat Morency and Liz Fleming’s collection. Clockwise: Willows Pavilion, Atlantic House, Pavilion, OceanView Hotel, and an 1897 membership certificate in the first Juniper Point Association.

In the 1950s and 60s, the young and exuberant teacher, Belle Linskey, would ring a big cowbell when it was time for her students to come in from recess.

Every morning when she put her “fancy shoes” into a desk drawer and changed into her red chunky-heeled lace-up orthopedics, the kids knew that the school day had begun. Children often studied outside, visiting a neighbor’s garden to analyze the life cycle of daffodils or dashing across the street to learn about tides or starfish at Juniper Beach. If little Johnny fell into the water, Miss Linskey would just send him home for a new set of clothes. The milkman would leave milk on the windowsills to keep it cool and the children had to “freeze” in position whenever the phone rang, as Miss Linskey was also the school secretary. The boys’ bathroom had a rock ledge over a large round sink, and the boys would aim their pee over the sink into a bare light bulb.

A sizzling clean hit would result in cheers from the other kids since nobody ever bothered to close the door.

Dr. Nancy Harrington, the president of Salem State College for the past 17 years, spent her first 11 years in the Salem Willows and returned to the neighborhood as a young professional. She has fond memories of going to the Juniper School when she was on holiday breaks from Saint Chretienne’s, the Catholic School that she attended.

She says she is not sure why she was allowed to go to the Juniper School but, as her widowed mother worked, her neighborhood school accepted her during Catholic school holidays. Dr. Harrington recalls a lively and adventurous childhood in the Willows, scampering on rocks, and “helping” her older brothers who worked at the carousel and boat rentals. Infused with the “sense of freedom,” Dr. Harrington spent her childhood days by the shore on a bike, looked after by the ever-vigilant neighborhood watch.

Pat Morency, whose mother was also widowed at a young age, has spent most of her life in the Willows, too.

Her mother rented a different summer cottage each year,

leaving a young cousin or neighbor in charge of the children while she went to her government job in downtown Salem. When she could afford it in the 1940s, her mother bought a shingled cottage in the Willows where Pat’s son Mike and his children still live. In Pat’s words, “The Willows is a place where everything goes, where people take care of each other, and where, hopefully, no one is ever alone.” Other Willows residents discuss their neighborhood in very similar terms.

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All of the “uptown kids” were always at the park, playing at the arcade, eating ice cream, and flirting. But Mary Wilson says that she just couldn’t afford to take her six kids to the park much, except for an occasional ice cream cone. If any of the Willows kids crossed the line, one of the neighbors would certainly see and give the parents a call. If Mary got the call, she would “march over there and get them home.”

Juniper Schoolhouse

Willows folks accepted the eccentricities of their neighbors. A woman famous for her date nut bread distributed a loaf to every grieving family who had lost a loved one. Ruth Daphne had rows and rows of scotch tape all over the house so that she could tape up her sagging eyelids when they got too heavy. Miss Lucy always made all of her own Halloween treats—individual cups cut into a cone shape, filled with cake and decorated with paper ghosts. Kids knocking at Mrs. Remen’s door had to sing for their treats. John Martin always gave money at Halloween. The first kids got pennies and nickels, but the last kids to get to his house often walked away with five-dollar bills. The Skinners insisted that their dog “Queenie” be addressed as one of the family with a kiss or a handshake. When Queenie finally died after a long and happy life, she was cremated and her ashes were displayed on the mantel. Her also received a special to have a sense that, family loaf of date nut bread.

Mary Wilson and her late husband Bill bought a house on the ocean for $13,000, a hefty amount in 1948. As most mothers didn’t work, families would meet on the grounds of the Juniper School every afternoon. While Mary’s children played, she and the other mothers would have tea and cookies, all laid out with silver and china. Everybody Willows neighbors seem knew everybody in those because they lived in such close proximity, days and kids could “never Willows neighbors seem do anything wrong.” Each they had better both watch out for their to have a sense that, because mother had a signal to call they lived in such close proxneighbors and remain tolerant of their her kids home for lunch or imity, they had better both dinner. Mary had a foghorn watch out for their neighidiosyncrasies.

The combination is while other mothers had bors and remain tolerant a school bell, whistle, or something to celebrate, and the Willows of their idiosyncrasies. The kazoo. After the kids dashed combination is something to community loves its celebrations. in for lunch when their sigcelebrate, and the Willows nals were called, they just community loves its celebrations. The Juniper Point Assoas quickly ran back outside to play. The same drill applied ciation was created explicitly for the purpose of socializing at dinner. But when the streetlights went on at night, every and shares in the club were sold for $5.00 as early as 1897. kid knew that they had to “high tail it back home.”

Now, residents pay annual dues and the club thrives on gettogethers many times a year where members simply enjoy As they weren’t often allowed to go into each other’s company. the Willows Park, neighborhood kids would often try to sneak over Sutton Avenue rooming house, later bequeathed to Lucy Towne who lived the imaginary line at the there until 2002. stone pillars that separate the residences from the park itself.

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The Fourth of July

he Fourth of July has always been the biggest annual celebration in the Willows and residents have long had elaborate preparations. The weekend before the Fourth, cardboard boat races are held in the cove by Steps Beach and a horseshoe tournament lasts for hours in the sun. For generations, celebrations of the Fourth have started with a 7:00 a.m. memorial service for all of the Willows residents who died that year. As residents gather in tribute, they joke that they are there to make sure that their names are not on the list of the departed.

Later at the “Horribles Parade,” handmade floats and costumed acts march in a line that snakes its way through the neighborhood. Ted Kennedy has been depicted as disheveled and drunk for the past 25 years, and the hours that a past mayor of Salem clocked on the golf links also have been prominently documented. Each year since 1964, the Wilson Band and its tambourine chorus have marched while exuberantly repeating The Battle Hymn of the Republic several times, as that seems to be one of the few songs that all of its players know. And many of the fathers and grandfathers will strut down the parade route in satin dresses and wigs, keeping alive the tradition of dressing in drag that began in the 1920s.

Various groups hold “secret meetings” so as not to divulge the flavor of that years’ float or act. One year, Mrs. Burns dressed like Admiral Byrd in an outfit made of dozens of cut up mink stoles. In the heat of summer, she spent the day in a fur suit mushing a sled tied up with her neighbors’ dogs. Another year, “The Wackys” hammered an elaborate stage onto two cars in order to make a flying trapeze. One of them posed at the top doing flips and twirls during the entire parade route.

One of the oldest residents is crowned “Grand Marshall” and rides in a shiny convertible at the head of the parade. Children get tickets for a lunch box with a hot dog, a Hoodsie, and a bottle of bubbles to blow into the wind. Kids who march in the parade are each handed a fifty-cent piece and later in the afternoon they scamper in the sand to look for buried quarters. And at the end of the day, young and old, drunk and sober, dance in the playground to a band playing oldies or reggae. As the celebration ends, tired and sunburned neighbors and their friends gather on the beach wall to see the fireworks in Beverly. Few actually make it to Derby Wharf to see Salem’s own display. The next day, the red, white, and blue bunting will be packed away until it’s time to plan for next year’s festivities.

Fourth of July: Mrs. Burns dressed as Admiral Byrd, Wilson’s Band, and the memorial service.

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in the direction of the sea to help rescue an oil tanker stranded off of Juniper Point. That evening, the crew of a local rescue boat from Gloucester, the Can Do, was lost trying to get to the tanker while Willows residents mourned helplessly from the shore.

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The Willows Mentality

t is the sense of preserving tradition, an “anything goes” outlook, and the notion that both joy and tragedy can be best faced in the company of others that creates what some residents claim as a “Willows mentality.” This outlook has helped residents come together for both celebrations and times of unimaginable sadness.

Salem’s location was chosen because of its harbor, and its history is intricately tied to the Atlantic Ocean. The Willows is perhaps the neighborhood of Salem that has had the most modern-era tragedies due to the sea. In 1952, a Sunday morning squall hit the Salem harbor. Men were thrown from their orange pier boats into the propellers, decapitating several of them. Liz Fleming, a lifelong fourth-generation Salem resident, recalls the community rescuing those who could be saved and securing the bodies of the victims for their families.

The blizzard of 1978 knocked out the power in all but four or five homes in the Willows, where neighbors gathered to warm up and share stories. All of the neighborhood men got shovels and plowed out the Willows, marching down Fort Avenue together in rows to secure an exit for their trapped neighbors. The “Order of Royal Shovelers,” first initiated during a community dig in 1920, had been revived. During that same 1978 storm, the Coast Guard requested that all Willows residents point their car lights

In 1992, when a dear Willows resident was found murdered at sea by a local sailor and psychopath, her weighted body dragged up by a local lobsterman, the community rallied to quell the sensationalism, to honor her quietly as one of them. The protection that the Willows’ community gave her family and the ongoing efforts quietly at work to preserve her memory are evidence of the respect that the neighborhood extends to its members.

There seems to be an unspoken rule that those who live in the Willows will be watched over and helped by the community. The interconnectedness of families and the houses that have been traded over the years anchor Willows residents to the place. Both the watchfulness and the playfulness create the vibrancy that unites those families. This allows for traditions to be passed on and enhanced, even as the ghosts of the past are constant reminders of life’s perils.

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The Willows Today

lthough a shadow of its glamorous past, the Willows Park today is a slice of Salem lore, and remains a top destination on summer evenings for many local kids and seniors. There are Big Band concerts on Tuesday nights, fried clams at Cappy’s, and chicken Chop Suey sandwiches at Salem Lowe for $1.57. Hobbs’ popcorn, taffy kisses, and homemade ice cream are the stuff of legends. Tinny arcade games shriek and whistle, and for a quarter kids can pound a rubber mallet onto the head of plastic alligators who dart in and out of their caves in syncopated unison. Cracked yolks of the Wack-a-doodle-doo cause chickens named Clucky, Plucky, Lucky, Ducky, and Crispy to lose their feathered heads.

The “love tester” will let you know for a penny whether your sex appeal is red hot or lukewarm. The turbaned

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Zoltan, for a dime, will answer questions about your future if you pick up the black plastic telephone receiver. Lucky rolls of the skee-ball or sharp shots with toy rifles can lead to a few more yellow tickets to exchange for the jackpot of plastic prizes made in China. A rubber spider costs just one ticket. A stuffed Scooby Doo demands over 3,000 and almost as many quarters down the slots.

On some hot summer days, buses of seniors and group home residents sit on folding chairs while their aides tie on paper bibs so soft serve ice cream doesn’t drip onto their clothes. Though the Willows Park has lost much of its past splendor, it still harkens back to a time when visitors hungered for the respite of a seaside resort. The neighborhood, however, has kept its sense of camaraderie and old traditions seem to be embraced and enhanced by newcomers and old-timers who have interacted over the years.

Mary would lament.

Other longtime Willows residents “Bubbles” and George Berry, who live next door to us in the house that Bubbles’ parents bought On summer days, we go down the street to Juniper in the 1940s have “special” Halloween and Easter Beach where I watch my daughter Marina and a dozen treats for Marina and her sister Mattea.

Kit Kats or neighborhood kids line up at the “diving rock” at high tide Russell Stover Eggs are secured with a rubber band to take plunge after icy plunge. When they tire, they play and a few mermaids and pirates in dollars the sand until the sound of Although a shadow of its glamorous past, the for their the Mister Softee truck arriving promptly at 2:00 p.m.

Willows Park today is a slice of Salem lore, “college funds.” Jane and Gene Dion wave makes them shriek for ice and remains a top destination on summer from their porch and cream. The Juniper playwith us every ground is often full of kids evenings for many local kids and seniors. chat time that we walk organizing a baseball game down Columbus Avor challenging each other to enue.

Pat and Karen take Marina and Mattea for special jump the farthest as they fly off of the swings from the top afternoons of skee-ball at the arcade.

They come of the arc. The Juniper Community Club hosts Halloween home with their grinning mouths caked in blue hayrides, winter bowling parties, and Easter egg hunts. In sugar and their clothes covered August, there will be a clambake or a pig roast on the beach with chocolate. for the Club’s “annual meeting” when new officers will be elected and neighbors will once again toast the summer.

When we arrived in Salem, my partner Olga and I were certainly “outsiders,” not quite sure what we were even doing in New England. On our first walk through the neighborhood, Mary Wilson asked us, “Are you girls from Spain?” We didn’t quite know how to respond, later laughing that we should have said ‘yes’ since Colombia and New Orleans, our birthplaces, were both former Spanish colonies. But it didn’t really matter since, after that, neighbors always greeted us with “hi girls,” no matter if they were addressing one or both of us. We quickly knew a number of Willows residents, and that number tripled when we adopted our daughter Marina in 1999 and “Nana Mary” Wilson offered her services as caregiver and surrogate grandmother. She would wheel Marina around in what looked like a Victorian pram, and soon when we walked around neighbors on every street would shout and wave, “Hi, Marina!”

When I picked Marina up in the afternoons, Mary would often be holding her, arms numbed by the leaden weight of her chubby body. She just “wouldn’t go to sleep by herself,” 9

Liz Fleming and Patricia Morency

Two Residents Preserve the History of the Willows

Juniper Community Club beach supper, 1998.

We have been touched by the many gestures of kindness that these and many other Willows residents have offered us over the years. And through them, we have come to understand how a family of newcomers originally from New Orleans, Colombia, and Guatemala can be accepted into a neighborhood steeped in tradition and united by networks of complex relationships molded over generations.

The inspiration and much of the material for this article came from Patricia Morency and Liz Fleming, two Willows residents with long family ties to the neighborhood. These two women have spent 20 years documenting the families, houses, places, traditions, and events that have created the only place that they have ever called home.

As I ready for another summer by the shore, thinking about orange sunsets, daily sails of the schooner Fame across my backyard, and quick dips into the freezing ocean, I read in the paper that New Orleans is sinking faster than the experts had realized. Many climatologists and environmental engineers recommend that the lowest-lying neighborhoods of New Orleans not be rebuilt. Some speculate that the whole region may disappear in a hundred years. The neighborhood of my youth may well be one of the areas lost to the catastrophic alteration of the environment. Because I have witnessed the loss of the only other neighborhood that I have ever been a part of, my fondness for the Willows, its quirks and characters, has been cemented. I also have newfound reverence for the power of the sea: how it can both destroy and bring people together. It is that closeness that breeds community, and the sense of perilousness that inspires both oddities and their forgiveness.

Pat and Liz began their documentation of Willows history in 1986 when they saw four or five neighborhood seniors sitting on a bench by the ocean. Pat remarked to Liz that they would never again see this “riot of different characters that live here” if they didn’t document it themselves. Pat ran home to get her camera and the first photograph of their Willows collection was taken. After that initial photograph, residents and friends soon began bringing them pictures, documents, and clippings that they had “never quite known what to do with.”

In the past 20 years, Pat and Liz have amassed seven five-inch binders on families, houses, the Willows Park, shipwrecks, weather, trivia, the Juniper School, the Fourth of July, Winter Island, and more. What started as a documentation of elders and families is now an impressive history of a neighborhood. Their goal is to continue collecting information, old and new, with the hope that, “someday, somebody might want to take it over.”

It is the very blend of nature, history, and risk that has united the Willows residents and allowed their memories of the past to fuel the present. The neighborhood’s lively and eccentric, caring and thoughtful residents share both joys and sorrows and breathe life into old traditions. With images of a crushed and broken New Orleans still fresh in my mind, I am comforted to be among friends. I am one of them now. It is the very ebb and flow of the tides that anchors us to the past, shapes the present, and offers us shelter from the storms.

Kim Mimnaugh

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Julie Whitlow is an Associate Professor in the English Department and co-coordinator of the Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language at Salem State College.

A native of New Orleans, she has lived in the Salem Willows for the past 10 years.

E S S A Y

Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike Jay McHale Photographs by Walter Rowen

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round 4:00 p.m. on a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon, two men in their late twenties, sporting ties and tweed jackets, pull into the parking lot of a jazz club on the northbound lane of Route One in West Peabody, Massachusetts. They pay the $3.50 music charge at the door and sit at a small table in the center of a room that holds about 200 people. They order beer and roast beef sandwiches.

A tall, thin man, accompanied by his bass player and drummer, takes the stage and sits at the piano. The matinee is about to begin. The musician is Bill Evans, who has worked with jazz greats Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley. When he plays, his head is bent forward, almost touching the piano keys. Soon, to the delight of the patrons, his sweet, impressionistic improvisations fill the room. He takes a solo. But a few customers are noisy.

A man in his mid-forties mounts the stage and takes the mike. He says, “Will you please be quiet during the solo. I ask you this with all due respect. If not, I will ask you to leave the club, and I’ll gladly return your money.”

The musician says, “Thank you,” and the room becomes silent.

The time is the mid-sixties. The place is Lennie’s-onthe-Turnpike, and the man is proprietor, Lennie Sogoloff, a professorial looking man wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

In its prime Lennie’s, as it became known, was the Boston area’s premier jazz club, featuring some of the best jazz performers in the country: Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Illinois Jacquet, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, and Buddy Rich. For area jazz, these were Golden Years.

Previous page clockwise: The Don Ellis Orchestra, John Hendricks, and Wynton Kelly. Above: Buddy Rich.

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Bill Evans

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eonard “Lennie” Sogoloff was born in 1923, the last of six children of Russian immigrants Samuel and Sadie Sandler Sogoloff. Lennie’s father was a buffer in the Peabody tanneries who also dabbled in real estate.

After graduating from Peabody High School in 1941, Lennie was drafted into the army. Because of nearsightedness, he never shipped overseas. Rather, he received special training in engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

After the war, Lennie enrolled at the School of Practical Art on Newbury Street in Boston.

In 1946, a friend, Penny Abell, was preparing to open The Paddock Club on Lake Street in West Peabody. When illness prevented Abell from working on opening day, he asked Lennie to fill in for him. “That’s when I discovered that booze has a high markup,” Sogoloff jokes. On weekends he continued to work at the club, where welldressed patrons heard traditional jazz music. There he befriended Art Litka, a pianist from Beverly. They shared a love of good music. Litka, who worked as a manager for a company that distributed independently labeled records, asked Lennie to work for him. Lennie was on the road.

“I borrowed some money from my mother and purchased a 1942 DeSoto. It left a trail of oil all up and down the New England states,” he says. One of the labels, Music Craft, carried such artists as Dizzy Gillespie and the Artie Shaw Orchestra, featuring an 18-year-old vocalist, Mel Torme. “He later worked for me in person,” says Lennie.

“Many people have come to me and said, ‘Gee, I’d like to learn more about jazz.

I just don’t understand it.’ You just have to listen. If it hits you, you got it.

If it doesn’t hit you, move on.”

In 1951, Penny Abell got wind of a one-and-a-half story building for lease on Route One in West Peabody.

“We decided to lease it and open a club to provide a second income,” says Lennie. Called the “Turnpike Club,” it opened in April. After a year, Lennie abandoned traveling and music sales to become the club’s manager. The club became popular for the jazz records stocked in its juke box: Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Ella Fitzgerald, The Four Freshmen, Sarah Vaughan, and Joe Williams. Many of these artists would later appear “Live at Lennie’s!”

Leonard “Lennie” Sogoloff 14

“Music, to me, has always been an emotional experience,” Lennie says. “What I hear is the combination of harmonies plus presentations by individual soloists. It’s what pleases my ear. Many people have come to me and said, ‘Gee, I’d like to learn more about jazz. I just don’t understand it.’You just have to listen. If it hits you, you got it. If it doesn’t hit you, move on.”

In the summer of 1953, Lennie received a surprise visit from the famed New York disc jockey “Symphony Sid” Torin, who spent five years broadcasting on Boston’s WBMS after being fired from his New York radio program for making obscene remarks. In both cities, Symphony Sid enjoyed a large following among the subterranean set. His late night radio show featured the latest jazz recordings and occasional live broadcasts of such artists as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Getz. Torin casually suggested to Lennie that he convert his club to one that offered live jazz.

Lennie says, “I mentioned our small size. He suggested that I start with small groups. The seed had been planted.”

In 1954, Lennie bought out his partner, Penny Abell, and took over as the sole owner and manager of the Turnpike Club in a building that he always leased but never owned. Soon after, he met Barbara Raby. They both loved jazz, and she played a major role in the club’s growth as it evolved into a first-class jazz room. They married in 1956 and had three children: Leanne (1957), Karen (1958), and Adam (1963). Seeking more revenue, in 1958, the couple decided to present live music, at first only on Friday and Saturday nights. The club was reborn. “One of the musicians,” Lennie jokes, “was a drummer, who was probably

the worst drummer in the history of music. When he took a solo, it sounded like a guy falling downstairs with two suitcases, but he kept good rhythm.”

Lennie’s first full-time house musician was Joe Bucci, an accordionist from Malden who had taken up jazz organ, a Hammond B3. In the Spring of 1959, Lennie went to Bucci’s house to hear him play. “He knocked me out,” says Lennie. “He had great footwork on the pedals and a fresh approach to the instrument. His repertoire was right on the button, and he was a good looking kid.”

Joe Bucci, with Joe Riddick on drums, became a featured act, performing five nights a week. A unique aspect of his presentation was a mirror suspended above the organ so the audience could see his hands at work. He developed a strong following, delighting jazz fans and the people who worked there. “When he played Ebb Tide,’’ Lennie says,“a couple of bartenders would don rain gear in anticipation for when the ‘tide rushed in.’” Bucci packed the place.

In February 1963, Lennie received a call from Fred Taylor, a Boston promoter. The world-class vocalist and trumpeter, Roy Eldridge, was touring New England.

Alan Dawson, John Neves, and Chick Corea

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Nat Adderly, Alan Dawson, and Hugh Masakela

Quotes from Lennie Louis Armstrong: He was only performing in cabarets or in concert. He had outgrown clubs like mine. I think no one contributed more to the development of jazz than he did.

Miles Davis: He was a very complex person who fought demons throughout his life, but it was a pleasant experience to be involved with him. His presentation was altered when his group switched from acoustic to amplified sound. His audience diminished.

He expressed great personal regret to me for a week of poor attendance. Later, having endeared himself to a new audience, he performed at theVillage Green.That was a bitter-sweet week for me because his involvement with drugs affected his demeanor both personally and musically.

Illinois Jacquet: One night we hung out after hours with another patron. I left before they did. Later I discovered that in the parking lot he was struck by our friend’s car. It was like getting hit by a camel in the desert. For the rest of the week he persevered and never missed a set while sitting on a stool and using crutches.

Nina Simone: Her agent called two weeks before one of her appearances.

She was in a funky mood. He said she was sick of “being treated like meat.” She once told me that she didn’t like waiting in line to use the Ladies Room. I told her agent that the credibility and success of my club depended on advertised artists like her showing up. She did.

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Eldridge had four open dates, and Lennie booked him.

“This was my first nationally known artist,” says Lennie, “but I needed a rhythm section. So Taylor put together a group: Ray Santisi on piano, John Neves on bass, and Alan Dawson on drums. When Eldridge hit the stage and heard the introduction, he gave me a thumbs up,” recalls Lennie.

“That’s when I knew I had a club rhythm section.”

Lennie’s first ensemble group, the J.J. Johnson Quartet, appeared in May 1963. Johnson was famous for recording It’s All Right with Me, which he cut with fellow trombonist Kai Winding. The J.J. Johnson Quartet played to capacity crowds and rave reviews.

In 1965, the Count Basie Band became available. “I was worried about their price,” says Lennie. His wife Barbara said, “Honey, he’ll put you on the map.” Lennie removed three tables and suffered the loss of twelve paying customers to accommodate the Basie orchestra. “People thought I was crazy. I think I paid them three thousand dollars for three nights. That was a lot of money in those days.” Steve Johnson described the experience in the Melrose Mirror: “I arrived just prior to the next to last set. The set ended and Mr. Basie settled into the seat next to me for a short break.

We shook hands, made some small talk, and I offered to buy him a drink. ‘Yeah, man,’ he said, and Baptista brought him a bourbon, neat. The final set was great, as they always are, and needless to say, with my drinking buddy leading the band, I was in jazz heaven.”

Baptista was Lennie’s friend, Joe Baptista from Peabody.

He served as bartender and floor manager during the club’s pinnacle years. “Customers loved him. The artists loved him. He was my right arm,” recalls Lennie. Baptista also helped maintain Lennie’s “room discipline,” a quiet reverence for the music and respect for the artist.

The club, which first featured small groups and vocalists such as Joe Williams, Jimmy Rushing, Abbey Lincoln, and Boston’s Mae Arnette, began booking big bands. The Duke Ellington Orchestra with 16 members played the club in September 1967. In the late 60s it was not uncommon far Lennie to offer an entertainment package on New Year’s Eve that cost $25 per couple. This covered all they could eat and drink. Find that today!

In November 1966, Lennie hired the Buddy Rich Band.

The nationally acclaimed Rich “became the unofficial house band,” says Lennie. “He would play one night gigs throughout Europe and the United States and then come to play at my club, sometimes for two weeks.” Rich was known for his drum speed and amazing dexterity. He also had a brash tongue. According to Lennie, “Every night with him was like New Year’s Eve. It was a cooking band. One night cars were lined up in the breakdown lane on Route One waiting to get in.”

Writing for the Boston Globe, William Buchanan commented, “Musicians often joked about the simple and unpretentious aspects of the club. But despite the lack of carpeted floors and fancy fixtures, the club had gained a national reputation by presenting some of the world’s best-known jazz bands, small groups, and vocalists.” For the most part, the musicians performed six times a week including Sunday matinees. Today jazz venues usually hire artists for two or three nights. “Some worked the matinee willingly,” jokes Lennie. “Others thought I had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and considered Simon Legree the hero.”

The original building was cozy and possessed its own charm, but it came from humble origins. It was a converted laundry room that formerly supplied linen for cabin rentals on Route One. In December 1964, Lennie made

Mae Arnette: She enjoyed a huge following in the early stages of her career, but she had a family and didn’t travel much. Otherwise she would have gone farther. She possessed a very strong presence. When she took the microphone and said,“Good evening,” the room became hers.

The Four Freshmen: In early November of 1965, I was on the phone with their agent when the northeast power failure hit.

The phone went dead. We never reconnected.

They never appeared.

Zoot Sims: He used to yell to the waitresses,“Hey, Nurse, another scotch and water please.”

Roberta Flack: Ramsey Lewis called her to my attention. She worked my club for two weeks. SRO. One afternoon, she gave a live interview on WHDH radio with Norm Nathan at the Topsfield Fair.

She loved the rural atmosphere. After the fire, she performed a concert for me at the Music Hall in Boston.That sold out too.

Bonnie Raitt: She sat in and sang, just for the fun of it, with the Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and James Cotton performance. She displayed so much talent I decided to book her to open for Mose Allison.

During the same week, her father, John Raitt, was starring in a musical at the North Shore Theatre in Beverly.

We thought he would come to hear her. She was excited.

But the gig never happened. She was scheduled to appear in June. My club was destroyed by fire on May 30, 1971.

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Abbey Lincoln

a bold move to attract additional customers. He moved the building back 150 feet from the Turnpike to accommodate more front parking. Lennie says, “I wanted people to see all the cars and figure something good was happening there.

We reopened on Christmas night with Joe Bucci. The place was packed. People showed up in a party mood.”

warm décor. It was a small place that was cooking up big bands. It attracted very accomplished musicians. What I call ‘musical intellectuals’ started coming up from Boston.

It was a good training spot for aspiring musicians to hear the greats.” On Duke Ellington’s only appearance, he addressed the audience, by saying, “You have to admit, when Lennie throws a party, he hires one hell of a band.”

With its low ceiling, Illinois Jacquet said that comfortable atmosphere, and about 50 tables, four Illinois Jacquet said that the two best jazz the two best jazz rooms to play in the United States to a table, Lennie’s original rooms to play in the United States were were Shelly’s Manne Hole club established itself as a fully integrated and intiShelly’s Manne Hole in Los Angeles, on the in Los Angeles, on the West Coast, and Lennie’s-on-themate jazz room, its walls West Coast, and Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike Turnpike in West Peabody, decorated with album covon the East Coast. Jacquet ers and photographs of jazz inWest Peabody, on the East Coast. recorded live there, as did musicians who played there. jazz greats Jaki Byard and It exuded both warmth Stan Getz. Getz wanted to record a “Live at Lennie’s” aland coolness. According to Lennie, when Stan Kenton first bum. Lennie was delighted. Getz’s group worked an entire took the stage, he said, “Now I know what it’s like to play Sunday from two o’clock to midnight. Unfortunately the under a bed.” Boston singer Mae Arnette, who first sang tapes disappeared and were never found. at Lennie’s in 1962, recalls, “It was a groovy club with a

Thelonious Monk

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Then disaster hit. On May 30, 1971, Memorial Day In the late 1960s, Lennie’s started to diversify by preweekend, around 5:00 a.m., the club was ravaged by a fire senting comedians including “Professor” Irwin Corey and of undetermined origin. Twelve years of jazz history were Rodney Dangerfield as well as satirists Mort Sahl and Dick washed away by a fireman’s hose. Years later, Lennie joked Gregory. But the mainstay remained jazz. A mailed anabout the fire’s origin, “My suspicions point in the direcnouncement for May 12 through June 15, 1969, advertised tion of pianist Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, who played that night. a spectacular succession of acts: pianist Erroll Garner, jazz It could have been his cigar.” accordionist Art Van Damme, The comedian, “Professor” pianist Ramsey Lewis, trumOn May 30, 1971, Memorial Day Irwin Corey, called Lennie peter Bobby Hackett, organist Jimmy Smith, the Stan Kenton weekend, around 5:00 a.m., the club two weeks later. According to “He had the best line: Orchestra, and saxophonist was ravaged by a fire of undetermined Lennie, ‘I thought the fire was schedStan Getz. Such attractions made Lennie’s a utopia for origin.Twelve years of jazz history were uled for October.’” jazz fans.

Lennie’s reopened three washed away by a fireman’s hose. months later on Labor Day at Local radio personalities the Village Green, a barn-like helped raise the profile of Lencomplex about two miles north of the original club. Its nie’s-on-the-Turnpike. These included WBUR’s “Chaplain of new restaurant and function room served dinner before Jazz” Father Norman O’Connor, WBZ’s Bill Marlowe, and the performances. “When the owner saw the overflow WHDH’s Norm Nathan. Nathan, who opened his Sounds crowd on the night we reopened with the Buddy Rich of the Night with Count Basie’s hit rendition of Li’l Darlin’, Band, he thought he had died and gone to heaven,” recalled Lennie’s the best place in the Boston area for night members Lennie. people to gather and hear live jazz.

By the early 1970s, times had changed. Lennie recalls, “I couldn’t find enough jazz performers to fill 52 weeks.” He hired folk artists Tom Rush, John Hammond, Jr., Seatrain, and Kris Kristofferson. He featured pop artists Linda Ronstadt, Rick Nelson, and the Kingston Trio. When Lennie’s wife, Barbara, saw Bette Midler appearing early in her career on the Johnny Carson show, she encouraged him to hire her.

He did. Midler was a huge success.

Regular attendees from the greater Boston area included Red Sox players Earl Wilson, Rico Petrocelli, and Sparky Lyle; the Celtics’ Bill Russell and John Havlicek; and Bruins Bobby Orr, John Bucyk, and Eddie Johnston. Political activist Jesse Jackson came to the club to hear Miles Davis. Boston City Councilor “Dapper” O’Neill would sometimes take the microphone between sets to regale the audience, Irish style, with ballads. Singers Maria Muldaur and Bonnie Raitt, both living in Cambridge, attended regularly.

Lennie’s not only featured the best jazz, but it also served the best roast beef sandwiches. “‘Mountains of Beef’ we called them,” says Lennie. “In the sixties, I was fortunate to have hired Bob Morelli as a bartender and food manager.” Morelli worked for Lennie while attending Salem State College where he majored in English.

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Dizzy Gillespie

Lennie also discovered an aspiring comic, Jay Leno, from nearby Andover. “He showed up in February 1972, responding to an ‘Open Mike’ ad. When he said, ‘I’m a comic,’ I said, ‘Then make me laugh.’ He went into a short routine about an old Elvis Presley movie, and he cracked me up. I asked him if he could perform like that for twenty minutes.

He said, ‘I can do twentyfive.’” Lennie invited Leno

Clockwise: Ron Carter, Nina Simone, Roland Kirk, and Charles Mingus

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Clark Terry

to appear as a special guest during Mose Allison’s Saturday night session. The comic rocked the house.

Publicity photograph

Lennie jokes, “ I never thought he would become so successful. I figured, ‘He has my first name, Len, with an O.’ He’s made more money and has become more famous than any performer I ever had.

And I could have been his Jay Leno, circa 1972 manager!” The two remained close. Leno sent Lennie a copy of his autobiography, Leading with My Chin, inscribed, “Lennie, I couldn’t do it without you.”

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Self portrait

Lennie didn’t renew his lease at the Village Green. He decided to close the club in 1972 after twenty-one years of operating Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike. His daughters were in high school and his son was ten. Lennie had worked many long hours away from his family. Looking back on his legendary career, Lennie says, “I booked musicians. I tended bar. I drove performers to and from the airport.

In short, I did everything to keep the club afloat. I did it because of my total attraction to jazz—the music, the artists, the audiences. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.”

An era had passed, but continues Brown, “Memories of Lennie’s linger like the unheard melodies on a Grecian urn.” By presenting live jazz, from blues to bebop, Lennie Sogoloff created a cultural icon on the North Shore of Boston. He showed the way. He made the scene happen.

Kim Mimnaugh

DownBeat writer Fred Bouchard, in an article for Jazz New England (1975) described Lennie as a “ jocular but irascible, congenial yet aggressive person… noted for the bon mot, thick roast beef sandwiches, sentences that begin with the first person, and his inimitable way with both misunderstood musicians and braying patrons.”

On August 1, 1992, about 300 people gathered at Marblehead’s Unitarian Universalist Church to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the club’s closing. In an article for Marblehead Magazine, Kerry Brown wrote: “I’ve witnessed jazz in many famous clubs—Birdland, Sweet Basil’s, Paul’s Mall. Most are blessed by big city locales.

Jazz is an urban music. But Lennie’s in West Peabody, squashed between a trailer park and a truck rental, was the greatest of them all.”

Jay McHale is a Professor of English at Salem State College and a frequent contributor to the Sextant. He was a regular patron at Lennie’s during the 1960s. In Autumn 2006, he worked with Lennie Sogoloff to organize his club’s memorabilia for donation to the Salem State College Archives.

Walter Rowen (1926-1994) was graduated from Lawrence High School and attended the the Conn School of Musical Instruments in Elkhart, Indiana. A veteran of World War II, he worked for the FBI in Washington, DC before moving to Lynn, Mass. where he worked as a representative for Squibb Pharmaceutical.

He played bass for many area jazz bands and was Lennie’s “house photographer.”

P O R T F O L I O

D None of the Above

Ink, graphite on paper, 8½˝ x 11˝ (2007)

Maureen Creegan Quinquis

Untitled 23

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Untitled

Ink, graphite, watercolor on paper, 40Ë? x 60Ë? (2007)

Other Side of the Test Sheet

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Acrylic, chalk, graphite on paper 40˝ x 60˝ (2006)

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Untitled

Ink, watercolor, graphite on paper 8½˝ x 11˝ (2006)

Ink, graphite on paper 8½˝ x 11˝ (2006)

No Child Left Behind No Child Left Behind II

This is Your Brain on Testing

Acrylic, graphite on paper 8½˝ x 11˝ (2006)

Ink, graphite, pen, acrylic on paper 8½˝ x 11˝ (2006)

Do Not Bend, Fold, or Deviate

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Chalkboard paint, chalk, ink, graphite on paper 8½˝ x 11˝ (2006)

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Untitled

Ink, chalk, graphite on paper 8½˝ x 11˝ (2006)

I

Kim Mimnaugh

ncreasing rigidity of school curricula and impersonal standardization in testing seem to be unstoppable trends in educating children and adolescents today. In this portfolio Maureen Creegan Quinquis explores the effects that these practices have on students. Using graphite, chalk, ink, and paint, Quinquis layers metaphorical forms. Underlying structures of geometric grids form a ground that takes on the shape of ubiquitous multiple-choice answer sheets. The ever-present grids represent the continual assessment and evaluation that are often unfortunate substitutes for real learning. Suspended above the grids are layers of increasingly organic and expressive images that generate tension with the controlling grids and comment on the direction of educational policy. Venetian blinds shut out creativity. Bell jars hold suppressed curiosity in airless containers. Calipers preclude personal expression. Other symbols reinforce the message: broken pencils, swinging pendulums, obscured texts, and shattered ladders.

Maureen Creegan Quinquis is the Graduate Coordinator for the Master of Arts in Teaching Art at Salem State College. Maureen is an exhibiting artist with an MFA from Tufts University and the Boston Museum School. She also possesses an MEd in Arts and Learning from Endicott College, and she is currently completing her doctoral studies in Education. Her artwork is included in several prestigious collections, and her drawings are currently in the Boston Drawing Collaborative at the Bernard Toale Gallery.

While Quinquis uses her work as a critique, it is also a positive call for teachers to nurture creativity and expression in an overly rigid world. She advocates for a model of teaching and learning that emphasizes the individual rather than the aggregate and for a type of evaluation based on analysis rather than rote. Her artistic style is gestural, expressive, distinctive; it conveys that collective progress is often made at the expense of personal growth.

She questions the advisability of the current movement toward standardization while she reminds us of the human relationships necessary for effective education.

Charcoal, ink, graphite on paper 40˝ x 60˝ (2007)

­—Patricia Johnston

Untitled

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E S S A Y

Beyond Access:

Cleti A. Cervoni 30

Kim Mimnaugh

Girls and School Science

Rachel: I’m not a scientist yet because you study things like animals and you go out in rain or snow (She pauses) But Jerry, he’s a scientist.

I

Introduction phors they use and the objects they employ in “doing science.” Seven- and eight-year-old children’s study of live hermit crabs and snails provided an opportunity to analyze discourse for cultural meaning. Emilie and Lizzie talked about how they needed to keep the animals “wet.” They took a plastic container, filled it with salt water from the aquarium and placed two animals in the container, telling me that they were “making a little ocean so the animals will feel comfortable.” The girls not only used words to express a concept of “care” for animals but they physically acted out “caring” by creating a place the animals would “feel comfortable.”

By focusing specifically on girls these initiatives perpetuate the myth that girls are less capable of doing “real” science and require special programs designed for them. For example, the science education research literature has determined that girls do not use tools exactly the same way that boys do and concludes that to be successful in science girls should have more opportunities to tinker with tools like boys. I suggest that it would be more fruitful to look at the multiple ways that boys and girls do science. Focusing on the differences between girls and boys does not take into consideration that children engage in science in multiple and context dependent ways. Researchers must develop a deeper understanding of why girls are resistant to science by seeing it as a cultural phenomenon and creating a climate in the classroom where gender relations can be equalized for girls and boys.

Emilie and Lizzie showed me by their words and actions what they mean by “caring.” In one sense they were performing gender roles by their conversations and behavior. Their actions signaled larger western cultural ideas of how one cares for animals. Analyzing social discourse in this way shifts the responsibility for social change from a focus on the individual’s behavior to the social and cultural institutional structures that create, replicate, or constrain individual behavior.

I spent one school year interviewing, observing, and conducting my own science research sessions with eighteen seven- and eight-year-olds (eleven girls and seven boys) as they engaged in “hands-on science” in a suburban classroom north of Boston. In this classroom the children “did science” by sorting and classifying objects, measuring with available tools, identifying and accurately naming animal behaviors, and experimenting with water, sand, and small animals. The pedagogy in this science classroom represents the best practices for teaching.

Science educators believe that science knowledge does not come from the objects themselves but from the ideas Kim Mimnaugh

In my research, I ask a different question: how do girls and boys interact with each other around science? I analyze their discourse—words and actions—in the school context. Their social discourse provides clues to cultural meaning in the stories the children tell, the meta-

Kim Mimnaugh

n the United States, a gender gap both in achievement and retention in science continues to plague science educators. Over the last decade, a variety of strategies to close this gap have been proposed—encouraging girls to take more science classes, providing scholarship programs, mentoring promising students, and designing special programs for girls. These strategies have defined the problem as increasing girls’ interest and survival in science classes and careers. Although the achievement gap between boys and girls has narrowed, simply improving girls’ access to science has not solved the problem totally.

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generated by the students’ manipulation of objects. This way of teaching science encourages interaction and conversation between the teacher and the students and among the boys and the girls. Researchers of gender equity believe this pedagogy allows the classroom teacher to hear the boys’ and the girls’ emerging science ideas. In my observations I heard individual student’s ideas, which often included gendered responses to the science activity that were not usually expressed in front of the teacher.

For example, one day I observed Jessica and Howard looking at two tadpoles to decide if they were the same or not. I noticed how the teacher directed the children to see subtle difference. The children responded to her in kind, using a language of difference to describe the tadpoles.

However, when the teacher left the two children alone, Jessica added an interpretation of the tadpole behavior as “hugging,” which is a human activity. The children seemed to be aware of language appropriate for science, or at least language the classroom teacher preferred.

Teacher: I don’t know if they are the same or different.

You guys are the scientists here. Because we don’t get the time to notice them closely so I’m curious to know what you think.

Jessica:

That one is like light and that one is dark.

Teacher: So, even those two might be different?

The teacher leaves the children to continue their observations.

Jessica:

Howard, they’re hugging.

Howard: I think one’s a female and one’s a male.

Howard saw the tadpoles in human terms after Jessica brought it up. Jessica’s use of the domestic discourse enabled Howard to see the tadpoles in a deeper way.

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Discourse as Resistance

y observation of the boys and the girls working together is that some girls actively negotiated for more powerful positions. When boys tried to dominate science activities, I saw girls resist the requests to do things the boys’ way. The girls’ resistance took on a number of forms. Some chose not to engage with boys at all, especially if there was another girl in the group. For example, Kendra and Jessica were assigned to study hermit crabs and snails with Brian and Sheen.

The girls brought their hermit crabs and snails to the rug to act out a school scene and left the boys at the table to race their snails. The boys eventually moved to the rug to watch the girls. The boys didn’t participate with the girls, they just sat and watched and finally returned to the table to continue racing snails.

Other girls initially followed the boys’ lead but changed the science activity by shifting the discourse with references to domesticity and by appropriating teacher authority. For example, Jerry often tried to dominate the science activity by asking the girls to assist him, but the girls actively resisted his directions. One day Jerry tried to enlist Jessica’s aid to sort a collection of natural objects by size.

At first Jessica resisted by saying she was busy but she gave in and assisted Jerry with lining up the objects.

Kim Mimnaugh

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Jerry:

Jessica, help me line them up smallest to biggest.

Jessica:

I’m looking at stuff.

Jerry:

When they’re lined up you’ll be able to find what you need better.

Jessica agrees and helps him lay out the objects from big to small.

Here Jessica uses a teacher authority discourse.

Jessica:

Stop making them perfect.

Jessica:

Don’t touch. If you touch you’ll be in big trouble.

I’ll tell the principal and you’ll have to stay after school for the whole night.

Kim Mimnaugh

In saying she will tell the principal, Jessica used teacher authority as a way to resist Jerry’s desire to make the objects line up perfectly. When that did not work Jessica picked up an antler and used a domestic scene to change the focus. In doing so, she managed to silence Jerry.

belonged exclusively to girls. Unfortunately sometimes classroom teachers have misinterpreted these domestic discourses as girls’ way of doing science. However, I suggest girls might be using this discourse in a context where they feel powerful.

Jessica picks up the antler.

Jessica: The antler needs a wife.

What is important to notice in this interaction is the gender dynamics between Jessica and Jerry and the function of discourses drawn from home and school. At first Jessica resisted Jerry’s directions by telling him that she’s busy looking at other things. Only a domestic scene effectively silenced Jerry. Although Jessica used these discourses to reject Jerry’s positioning of her as his assistant and imposing his organizing structure, this does not mean that Jessica could not or would not choose to do science by sorting objects by their size in another context. We don’t know that. What it does mean is that in this particular context and in this particular social interaction with Jerry, she rejected his way of doing science in order to reject his assumption of superior status. I found this pattern repeated in my observations.

It is likely that the domestic discourse succeeded in shifting the power balance between the children because domestic life in western culture is still viewed as a site of power for women. Women remain the primary caretakers responsible for organizing the house and nurturing the children, although that is changing as men and women begin to share those responsibilities. Throughout my observations, I never heard or saw boys use a domestic discourse in their unstructured play or in their science activities. It

S

Beyond Access in Tool Use

cience researchers have focused on the use of tools by girls, arguing that because young boys have more opportunity to tinker with tools, they are better equipped to use scientific tools such as thermometers, hand lenses, and microscopes.

In the following science activity involving Marissa and Brian, Marissa positions herself as less competent than Brian in using a microscope despite her growing confidence and competence with the science tool. Brian for his part positions Marissa as less than competent by wanting to focus the microscope for her and blames her for moving the focus button. When she resists his help, he complains to me (acting in a role of a teacher) about how he will never get a turn if Marissa learns how to use the microscope.

Marissa is trying to focus the microscope because she is having trouble seeing her object under the scope.

Marissa directing Brian who is helping her: No, down.

Brian to me: Marissa will never let me have the microscope again.

C: Of course she will. Take turns.

She’s just trying to get it into focus.

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Brian: I was trying to get it into focus and she was like­— ‘No!’ C:

She wanted to do it herself?

Brian:

I was teaching her how to do it.

C:

Oh. I guess she didn’t want to be taught how to do it, Brian.

Marissa is still having trouble: I can’t see it.

Brian:

Marissa, I’ll do it.

National standards and testing have left little room for creativity and expansion of the science curriculum.

Brian goes over to the microscope and focuses it.

Brian: I think Marissa hit the button by accident.

I was trying to get that one in focus.

C:

So, now you got it to work, Brian?

Brian: Oh yeah, in a big way.

Brian: I made it so good. I told you I was good at it.

Brian: I told them I’m the best person to make it focus.

Marissa then goes over to the microscope that Brian has now focused for her.

Marissa: Really cool, really good focus, maybe I’m not the worst focuser.

C:

You thought you were the worst focuser?

Marissa: Brian said he was the best; maybe he’s not the best in the class. I’m second best, I think.

Marissa initially resisted Brian’s help and expressed her desire to learn how to focus the microscope herself. However, even though she learned to focus the microscope, she still deferred to Brian as the best focuser in the class.Yet in another context, Marissa exerted leadership and confidence when she and Matthew read a thermometer.

This reminds us how important it is to see children doing science in multiple contexts.

As Marissa and Matthew looked through a tub of pond water for animals, Matthew placed a number of thermometers in the tub. Marissa asked Matthew to remove them because she thought they would hurt the animals.

Marissa to Matthew: Matthew, you’re going to kill the animals.

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She takes out all the thermometers and bug boxes that Matthew had placed in the tub. So we don’t kill any organisms.

In this next exchange Matthew is reading one of the thermometers.

Matthew reads the thermometer: Sixty degrees.

Marissa: Degrees what? I’m going to be nudgy like Ms. A (the teacher).

Context makes the difference. This research demonstrates that there is no need to provide girls with their own form of science activities—sometimes called kitchen science—as some have suggested.

Tool use itself sometimes presented a moral and ethical dilemma for some girls. For example, Jessica explained to me that she wasn’t very good with tools, not because some of the boys were better but she was afraid she might hurt the tadpole she tried to pick up with tweezers. It wasn’t that Jessica did not know how to use tools as the science community might suggest. Earlier feminist readings might suggest this illustrates that girls have a different orientation to science, a moral and ethical orientation. I suggest instead that the girls’ gendered orientations towards science emerge and develop in multiple ways depending upon the context.

Gender Equity and School Science

S

olving the gender equity problem in science education is much more complex than just providing access for girls. The classroom is a particular social context with interactions between boys and girls, students and teacher, and in the case of science, with materials and objects. The girls take up different subject positions in these social interactions. Their discourses are contextual, often gendered, and typically grounded in western, white, middle-class, cultural metaphors such as care, domesticity, and teacher-authority.

These discourses also present a dilemma for the girls.

Response to different contexts is mediated by their cultural images of femininity. As girls negotiate their individual conceptions of femininity along with other peoples’ (the classroom teacher, their parents, their peers), they develop a coherent gender identity. Girls struggle with wanting to be competent in science, while boys often position them as weak and incompetent.

Studies in science education in the last two decades have often examined gender differences as if there were a girls’ way of doing science (i.e. cooperative and caring) and a boys’ way of doing science (i.e. competitive and fact-based). My research demonstrates that constructing knowledge in science as a set of dualisms, subjective or objective, masculine or feminine, girls’ way or boys’ way has outlived its usefulness. It is more fruitful to analyze

Kim Mimnaugh

Students Ailish Driscoll and Angela Berry study hermit crabs at the Saltonstall School in Salem.

the multiple, continuous set of orientations that both boys and girls use in “doing science,” recognizing that these orientations shift with context and are gendered and culture-bound. Thinking of science knowledge in this way, as “situated” or as a “view from somewhere” (as theorist Donna Haraway describes it), acknowledges that children bring individual experiences to their science learning.

These experiences are shaped by context and culture (race, class, and gender) that are part of one’s identity.

A more rigorous look at children’s own understanding of what science is and how they negotiate their gender identities as part of doing science provides better understanding of the definition of science, which some have argued is too narrow.

Kim Mimnaugh

National standards and testing have left little room for creativity and expansion of the science curriculum.

Even within these constraints, it is possible for classroom teachers to plan instruction and to create a classroom climate that encourages interactions between boys and girls in science and pays attention to the discourses. Using a variety of strategies such as cooperative groups and individual projects, writing assignments, and media presentations gives children multiple ways to tell the teacher what they know and how they know it. Teachers would benefit from reflecting on their own relationship with science by exploring their feelings and biases. They have the opportunity to help girls and boys challenge, renegotiate, and transform science knowledge.

REFERENCES Brickhouse, N.W. “What kind of girl does science?: The construction of school science identities.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37 (2000), pp. 441-458.

Butler, J. Gender Trouble. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1999.

Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality Volume One. London: Penguin, 1978.

Haraway, D.J. “Situated Knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (1988), pp. 575-599.

Jones, G.M., Brader-Araje, L., Carboni, L.W., Carter, G., Rua, M.J., Banilower, E., Hatch, H. “Tool time: gender and students’ use of tools, control and authority.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37 (2000), pp. 760-783.

National Research Council. National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996.

National Research Council. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000.

Shaw, J. Education, Gender and Anxiety. Bristol: Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Walkerdine, V. Counting Girls Out. Bristol: Falmer Press, 1998.

Cleti A. Cervoni is an Assistant Professor in the Education Department teaching science methods to undergraduate teacher candidates and graduate courses in research and instruction and assessment. Dr. Cervoni has an EdD from Harvard University and is a graduate of Salem State College (biology). Her research looks at how gender and culture interface with learning in elementary science classrooms.

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E S S A Y

From Folklore to Popular Culture:

A Brief History of The Brownies Eileen Margerum

I

The Brownie in British Folklore

n the British Isles, where “the Brownie” originated, his story was part of traditional folklore. Much of “the fairy and folk lore of the British Isles,” the stories that ordinary people told around their firesides or passed on to their children, didn’t exist in written form until some time In tales recorded in Queen Victoria’s reign.

Of all the creatures recorded in folk tales, the brownie is the least magical. The fairies have great wealth and power over the fate of both men and nature; the leprechaun can provide riches to whoever catches him; pixies can steal babies and lead travelers off their paths and into danger; and confrom the English tact with seaborne shape-changlike the Selkies, seals who Midlands north through the Grampian ers became women, or the Nixies, Hills of Scotland, then west to the creatures who become horses and drown their riders, can be Hebrides, the brownie is normally a potentially lethal to humans. householder’s ideal servant; at his very The brownie, a solitary earthwhose name comes worst, he can do no more than torment creature from his dust-colored skin and hair, has none of these powers. a small number of individuals.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, books of folk tales from England, Scotland, and Ireland began to appear and a scholarly magazine called Folklore faithfully reproduced what researchers heard from farmers and rural townspeople in the remote parts of the British Isles. A confluence of factors caused this change: jealousy that recently translated French and German folk tales found popular audiences in England, a Romantic attitude that saw value in the words and ideas of simple folk, and a fear that spreading industrialism was erasing part of English cultural heritage.

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In tales recorded from the English Midlands north through the Grampian Hills of Scotland, then west to the Hebrides, the brownie is normally a householder’s ideal servant; at his very worst, he can do no more than torment a small number of individuals. Dedicated to one farm and its residents, he does the

work of several humans. He keeps the farm house, the crops, and the animals in good order. For his reward, he accepts a dish of cream, an oaten cake, and (in some versions) an occasional gold coin. In most versions, he lives in the shadows and works at night. The brownie’s dark side is revealed if he becomes displeased. This occurs when he overhears his work being criticized or (conversely) when the farmer tries to reward him with new clothes. In tales from the Hebrides, he merely bids the farmer farewell and leaves. In tales from the Midlands, his anger changes him into a “bogie” or “boggart,” who stays on the farm and disrupts it. A displeased brownie, whether he stays or goes, takes away the good luck he had brought to the farm. As a consequence, it fails.

If Palmer Cox had not named his artistic creations “The Brownies,” it is unlikely that brownies would figure as prominently as they do in modern folklore compilations.

I

The Brownies in Mass Culture n America, “the Brownie” or more accurately “The Brownies,” became part of mass culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

While folk culture emerges from ideas or images that ordinary people create and revise over time, and use for their own benefit, the term “mass culture” describes ideas or images that corporate entities create and promote, for their own benefit, to large numbers of people. Mass production and mass marketing essentially transform the individual from a potential creator of ideas and images into a passive consumer of them.

Mass culture came to dominate American life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the economy changed from one in which small manufacturers met local needs to one in which large centralized producers made far more than they could sell regionally and, thus, needed to find new markets. To convince Americans across the country to choose their products, they devised new methods of mass marketing: ads proliferated on billboards and sign posts, in newspapers and in magazines that were, themselves, promoted and sold across the nation.

St. Nicholas Magazine was part of this new economic structure. Founded in 1873, the publication rose to the pinnacle of children’s publishing by buying out and closing six of its smaller rivals during that decade. It absorbed their subscribers and incorporated their authors. By 1880, St. Nicholas had 70,000 annual subscribers. While most of the readership was in the East, the magazine was mailed as far away as the Great Plains, the Dakota Territories, and the western plains of Canada.

These subscribers were adults who paid $2.50 for the monthly issues or $3.00 for the issues bound into an annual—more than for many prestigious magazines for adults. For their money, they bought the highest quality

of writing and illustrations for their children.

Under the editorship of Mary Mapes Dodge, author of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, St. Nicholas became a sign of both taste and money.

Eventually, Palmer Cox became a beneficiary of the new production and distribution system. After eight years in New York City, scrambling to make a living in the cutthroat field of magazine illustration, he hit upon success. He had seen too many illustrated magazines start up and fold before they could pay for an artist’s work.

He knew that older, more established magazines often used an unknown artist’s drawings without acknowledgment.

Eventually, he discovered that publishers of children’s books and magazines had a more stable audience and enough money to pay for the work they accepted. The best of these, St. Nicholas, began to accept and use his work.

Cox’s story of “The Brownies’ Ride,” which ran in St. Nicholas in February 1883, is based on a folklore pattern: a magical creature or creatures (a witch or small imps) steal a farmer’s horse, ride it hard all night and return it, sore and sweating, to the barn before dawn. In the version written by Cox, the text is quite ordinary rhymed couplets. But the pictures have lively, dynamic movement depicting the group of small creatures controlling a horse ten times their size.

“The Brownies’ Feast,” which appeared in the next issue, again re-told a folk tale: a group of magical creatures steal the ingredients for a feast from their unwitting human neighbors. This time, as a nod to the moral tone required by the editors of St. Nicholas, the brownies replace what they have stolen, returning twice what they had taken.

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around them and, occasionally, to help worthy humans in need.

Over the next few years, Cox’s verse tales about the Brownies, always well-illustrated, appeared often in St. Nicholas. In 1887, twenty-four of them were gathered into a volume and published as The Brownies: Their Book. It sold so well that a second volume, Another Brownie Book, was published in 1890. In subsequent advertising, the publisher, the Century Company, proudly announced that “The Famous Brownie Books” had sold “nearly 100,000 copies.”

Whatever their charm or success, Cox’s Brownies had nothing to do with the folk tales of Scotland or England.

Even though Cox later alluded to the Grampian Hills of Scotland and reminisced that his Irish stepmother shared tales from many countries, he never overtly claimed that he based his “Brownies” on tales from Britain. However, when others leapt to that conclusion, he never corrected them. That way, he never had to explain what he had actually done.

In truth, Cox’s Brownies are an American creation. Unlike the solitary, unpredictable creature of British folk tradition, Cox’s creations are sociable, curious, risk-takers.

They work together toward a common goal; as a true democracy, there is neither dissent nor overt leadership. Their goals are to test, discover, and experiment in the world 38

Ads by the Century Company pulled out all the stops.

Adults were reminded that the Brownies books were already popular.

Cox’s special illustrations showed them why.

After the first few published tales, Cox refined the Brownies’ appearance and began to give them individual personalities.

Here again, they became American, or at least stereotypes that Americans would recognize.

The first individualized group of Brownies included the Policeman, the tuxedo-clad “Dude,” and a group of ethnic characters in native costumes: the Irishman, the Chinaman, and the German. All resembled figures common in late nineteenth-century stage comedy or vaudeville.

Cox quickly added more recognizable figures: Uncle Sam, the buckskin-clad Indian wielding a hatchet, the Student with mortarboard and gown, the Sailor, the Soldier in generic unform, the Englishman in loud checkered suit, the kilt-wearing Scotsman, and the generic “Brownie” with striped shirt and pointed hat. In many ways, their diversity of appearance and their unanimity of action made them a perfect illustration of the American motto: E Pluribus Unum. They were “the Brownie band” always acting as one.

In later adventures, when the Brownies traveled around the world, a new Brownie from each country was added; typically, these new additions played only minor roles in the adventures that Cox drew. In all, Cox created and copyrighted forty

“Brownie” figures and wrote Ladies’ Home Journal sent to its over 200 tales. female readers. It told its target audience, middle-class women, Although the Brownies alhow to manage their houseways adventured out at night, holds, dress, choose vacations, when the folklore brownie also and what to think about social worked, Cox assured his readand political issues. These lesers that his creations lacked the sons were reiterated for their brownie’s potential for doing children in the Brownies’ tales. harm. A legend that prefaced Consumerism was the newest each volume stated: “Brownand best ideal. The first group ies, like fairies and goblins, are of stories included one with imaginary little sprites who are a drawing of a Christmas tree supposed to delight in harmless laden with expensive gifts. The pranks and helpful deeds. They second series, in which the work and sport while weary Brownies went sight-seeing to households sleep, and never alhistorical places, showed a new low themselves to be seen by side of consumerism: spending mortal eye.” money to buy an experience.

Cox also moved his Brownie The Brownies also visited vaband away from the traditional cation sites acceptable to the folklore realm by changing their upper classes and the upwardlylocale. In “The “Brownies on mobile: Saratoga Springs, NewSkates,” printed in St. Nicholas port, and the Jersey shore. in February 1884, the BrownStarting in November 1883, the Even at their most consumies move into contemporary erist, Cox never forgot that his Brownies appeared in the first national tales were America. From their hiding meant to appeal to place in the woods, they see hucampaign selling Ivory Soap. children.

The Brownies’ magic mans skating on a frozen pond. meant that no boundary, either Intrigued, they run to a nearby physical or behavioral, could restrain them.

Their antics extown; after dark, they slip into a shop that rents ice skates ceeded a child’s wildest dreams and still went unpunished. and spend the night slipping and falling on the ice. Before They climbed the venerated Liberty Tree in Boston, slid dawn, they return the skates and disappear. down the White House balThis tale set several patustrade, and bounced so hard terns that Cox followed on the bed in the Lincoln successfully for years: from Bedroom that it collapsed. a liminal location (first, the This transgressive behavior woods; later, “Browniewas tolerable to parents land”), the Brownies spy a because it didn’t happen in human activity or location. every story. Cox carefully Magically, they acquire the added enough adventure Arnold PrintWorks sold patterns for twelve Brownie figures. necessary tools and spend the to please children, but not Their ad shows how the patterns would look as three-dimensional dolls. night engaging in the activity enough to upset adults. or exploring the place. Unlike Throughout his long career of writing Brownies tales, the brownie of folklore, who was stronger and more capable Cox was careful to discourage children from imitating the than mortals, these creatures have mishaps as they imitate more daring behavior of the Brownies. In effect, he set up a human behavior. The message is always clear: humans (espephysical barrier: children watched the Brownies’ adventures cially American humans) do things and live in places that litfrom the other side of the printed page. While the Browntle magical creatures admire from afar but enjoy only briefly ies could cross magically into the world of and often awkwardly. In this way, Cox showed his young adults, children could only reach the world of readers the good things of the world around them without the Brownies through their imaginations. When the encouraging them to imitate the Brownies’ behavior.

Brownies tried out the innovations of the era—using When Cox began producing Brownies stories for the the telephone or telegraph, testing an electric light bulb, riding in a hot-air balloon or early biplane or Ladies’ Home Journal in 1891, the focus changed; increasa mechanical street sweeper—they invariably had ingly, the Brownies admired creature comforts available to just enough problems to illustrate that these Americans. Cox’s little sprites reinforced the messages of items belonged to the world of adults. appropriate consumption and good social behavior that the 39

Becoming Popular Culture

ing the Brownies figures—only encouraged others to put the name “Brownie” on their products, sometimes even including a drawing that looked vaguely like Cox’s product.

ad Cox restricted his Brownies to tales for children, it’s unlikely they would have become objects of popular attention. However, he sold these unique figures as vehicles for promoting commercial products only months after they first appeared in St. Nicholas. Starting in

Brownie-like figures decorated everything from twelveinch wooden rulers to fancy mantel clocks, from packets of laundry wax and boxes of cheap cigars to delicate glass bowls and children’s china tea sets. Metal, paper, and wooden games carried the name and image of “Brownies.”

Brownie-like creatures appeared in ads for mechanical and industrial products, including farm machinery. Wallpaper and woven floor rugs were decorated with Brownies figures. Rubber stamps with Brownies’ images, even rubber and metal Brownies figures, none authorized by Cox, were widely advertised and sold. Worst of all, for Cox’s reputation and his fortune, others began writing and selling “Brownies” books.

H This rubber Brownie is one of many items that copied Cox’s designs.

November 1883, the Brownies appeared in the first national campaign selling Ivory Soap.

Later, they were in ads selling items as diverse as patent medThe Brownies in icine, facial cream, chocolate Popular Culture cream candies, crab cakes, and typewriters. o matter how popular During the next decade, a mass culture idea or Cox allowed the Brownies figimage is, few become ures to be sold. Brownies imtruly part of “popular culture.” ages were printed on cloth and To do so, an idea or image that sold by Arnold Print Works of started as a product of a corNorth Adams, Massachusetts, porate entity must be taken both as doll patterns and figover by ordinary people, given ures on linen handkerchiefs. meaning by them, and used for For Christmas 1892, contheir ends. sumers could buy a nine-pin Cox set the Brownies on this (bowling) game with genuine path when he allowed Arnold Brownies figures chromolithoPrint Works to sell printed graphed and pasted to wood.

Brownies images as doll patA year later, Midwesterners terns. Every seamstress who cut who bought Lion Coffee out and sewed together one of found a Brownie paper doll, these designs and then stuffed it as a premium, inside. All of into a three-dimensional figure these authorized uses of Cox’s became co-creator of a BrownBrownies were soon overshadie. Few of the thousands of dolls owed by the unauthorized uses. still exist; some among them Cox was always at a disadLion Coffee ads sold the premium (Cox’s Brownies) have repairs that suggest they more aggressively than the product. vantage: he could not copyspent time in the hands of chilright the name “Brownie” because it existed before his dren who applied their own imaginations to Cox’s figures. use of it. He couldn’t even copyright his overall design of In 1894, Cox took another step: he allowed children to round-bellied figures with spindly arms and legs. At best, he become Brownies. The Brownies in Fairyland, a one-act cancould claim uniqueness for their costumes. tata written to be performed by children, included singing So, as he drew them, he copyrighted roles of individual children. In the preface, Cox described each unique figure as a “Palmer Cox’s in detail how to paint their faces to look like Brownies. The Brownie.” It did him little good. tension between Cox’s need to control the Brownies by Every bit of publicity—by the copyrighting them and his desire to share their images with Century Company promoting his children is captured in Richard Outcault’s 1895 cartoon, books, by St. Nicholas or Ladies’ Home “The Fourth Ward Brownies” in which one street urchin Journal advertising his forthcoming stories, exclaims to another,” “Dere, Chimmy! If Palmer Cox wuz

by Arnold Print Works and Lion Coffee sellt’see yer, he’d get yer copyrighted in a minute.”

N

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Confirmation that the Brownies passed into popular culture came, ironically, from a corporate source. The Eastman Kodak Company, which succeeded by giving ordinary people a way to create and capture their own imagery, was keenly attuned to popular trends. In the late 1890s, for example, they tried to capitalize on the bicycle craze by creating a “bicycle camera.” In 1900, they offered “The Kodak Brownie” camera. Although the first ads contained figures like Cox’s Brownies, Eastman neither acknowledged him nor paid him royalties.

For the first time, two disparate connotations of “Brownie” were joined: the link with children and the implicit understanding that Brownies were connected with hidden magic. Many products that eased modern life were made in joyless, mechanical ways. From the making of standardized Ivory Soap bars to the proper mixing of chemicals and paper to produce safe photographic film, industrial processes were often dirty, smelly, and dangerous. Adding Brownies to the advertisements helped potential consumers focus on the end product and its benefits; whatever the Brownies did at night, all came right in the morning.

Book of 1904. Although derived from a different source than Cox’s Brownies, the organization for girls too young to be Girl Scouts (parallel to the Boy Scouts’ Cub troops) was designated “The Brownies” in 1916. In 1920 and 1921, W.E.B. DuBois published and edited The Brownies’ Book, a magazine for “the Children of the Sun,” his term for black children.

Numerous simple plays written for school children had the word “brownie” in their title; it meant a play easily performed by children, not the presence of Cox’s little sprites.

The first ad for Kodak Brownie cameras (above) used figures that any American in 1900 would recognize as Cox’s Brownies.

Below are genuine Cox’s Brownies, from one of six chromolithographed Christmas postcards produced by Louis Prang in 1896.

In the intervening decades, the implicit link with children grew. A recipe for chocolate dessert bars, called “brownies,” appeared in The Boston Cooking-School Cook

Kim Mimnaugh

Eastman applied the implicit notion of Brownie magic to picture taking: this was a camera so simple that children could use it and, because the Brownies were involved, it was safe enough for them to use. The gamble in using the Brownie name paid off; the Kodak Brownie camera, in its various evolutions, was the first camera of most American children well into the 1950s.

After Cox’s death in 1924, adults who had grown up with the books came to consider his stories quaint and out-dated.

By World War II, most were out of print. None of the subsequent commercial attempts to revive or use the Brownie name succeeded.

But the name “brownie” still lives in popular culture.

In 2000, to celebrate the centennial of the Kodak Brownie camera, George Eastman House and Museum in Rochester, New York mounted an exhibit featuring the history of the Brownie camera and images from Cox’s Brownies books. For one special event, they invited Brownie troops from the surrounding area to a party, where the little girls were served milk and brownies.

Eileen Margerum, Professor Emerita in the Communications Department at Salem State College, has been researching the life and work of Palmer Cox for about a decade. She is writing a book that highlights Cox’s place in the emerging consumer culture of late nineteenthcentury America.

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42

F O L K T A L E

The Mermaid of Pondside Kristine Doll

am the mermaid of Pondside. Turquoise and

indigo stream through my hair. Coral dances at

my feet. I am beautiful. I am ageless. I have riches

beyond imagining.

I am everything you want.

I can see the desire in your face as you strain to catch a glimpse of me, peering through the silvered water, raising your fingers to shatter the glare of the noon-day sun on the pond’s surface. I can feel your frustration as you thrust your hand into the water, my water, in the hopes of touching me, of feeling me, of drawing me out of my world and into yours.

Why are you so intent? Only one man has ever succeeded.

You know his name from the songs your grandmothers would sing, the songs they learned, in turn, from listening late at night to the stories of their elders, stories told in hushed whispers and muted laughter.

Tales of unimaginable wealth, of duels and daring, of cunning and betrayal. The sea churning with pirates; Port Royal bejeweled with their treasure. And he at the center of it all, the Ali Raja of the West Indies.

For him I rose up from the depths of the Caribbean, my body awash with the sea’s cool dampness and salt. And he! Resplendent with the sun’s warmth, echoing Apollo’s own virility, sweeping me up in his arms and promising me more than I even knew to ask for.

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And you? Young man from St. Elizabeth. What can you bring me? You, young man who has walked all this way to come and spy on me. What is it you want? Have your slender, strong feet borne you these many miles out of curiosity? Have you come to try to steal my golden comb, or to rob me of my crystal table? Have you come to plunder my treasure, to make away with the dowry my Spaniard gave me, to steal his glittering riches?

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Surely you know of the fate that meets those who fail.

You know that I can pull you under, pull you deeper to me, fill your lungs with beloved water as you reach to touch me... I can live in your world, but you will be forever changed in mine.

Still you do not back away? You are a brave one. Many like you have come, few have ever seen me, and fewer still have heard the music of my voice. Tell me, what is there about you to set you apart from the scores of others, from the many disappointed or despairing or drowned by their own foolhardiness?

Come closer. Yes, I can grant you a wish. Yes, if it pleases me... if you please me...

Glide in a bit more. Let me caress your ankles. Let me know your long, muscular legs. Just a bit deeper now.

Come, reach for me, let your arms wrap around me. You are so delicate and handsome and your eyes are so kind.

Just one more turn beneath the water’s surface, come, I have a little present for you, a gift from one of my own...

Now tell me. What do you know of my Alonso? From time to time I hear men talk about him on the pond’s banks as they brag about their plans to loot his treasure and their hopes to possess me. Is it true what they say? Was he betrayed by one of his own and ambushed by an English squadron?

Is he dead?

I have scoured the Caribbean for his body but to no avail.

Have they brought him inland where I cannot reach him?

This is as far as I can come, through secret underwater passages that lead from the sea into this pond.

He would never fail me. And I will never fail him.

I rise from the water everyday to scan the pond’s banks for him. I rise with his golden comb and crystal table so that they might reflect the sun’s rays like a beacon, lighting the way for him. I have waited for him all of these years, through earthquakes and fires, through hurricanes and floods. I have waited for him for generations. I will wait for him for eternity. My captain. My Alonso. My love.

You can help me. Here under the water I can read your heart. I know you are kind and good. I can see you are strong. Are you brave enough to do this for me? You can find out where he is.You can bring his body to me.

I will grant you anything you wish. I can take you to the wreck of the Fancy, the richest privateer ship of them all.

Let me glide you through my secret tunnel from the pond’s bottom to the open sea. I can show you a world beyond your dreams. Whatever you wish. Just bring my Alonso back to me.

It is time for you to go back now. Time for you to start your journey. I will wait for you. I will rise from the water everyday in anticipation of your return. Go now. Keep your word to me. Do not disappoint me. Go.

e awoke with a great pain searing through his lungs.

His head reeled, the dizziness disorienting him. He could see nothing, feel nothing other than the pain racking his chest, as if forcing his lungs to spew out water and gulp in air. As he struggled to sit up, he realized he was laying on the small stretch of sand that rimmed the pond, his legs half submerged in the blue-green water. Blinded for a moment by the sun’s glare off the water, he tried to make out the figure of his cousin, Kemron, hunting lizards on the hillside. Slowly he became aware of the other voices of Pondside—the birds singing, the beetles chirping, the geckos clicking. He focused his sight on the water beading up along his arms, his coffee-colored skin shimmering beneath each drop’s convex pool.

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His legs felt heavy. He tried to shake them awake. He scanned the hillside again for Kemron but his gaze fell on the pond’s farther side. From here, sitting upright, he could just make out the broken remains of an abandoned yoke.

He knew the story from his grandfather, how a wealthy farmer from the next parish had bragged to everyone for miles around that he could pull the mermaid’s crystal table right out from under her. He even bet his entire harvest of sugarcane that he could haul away everything—table, comb, treasure, and mermaid—by lassoing a leg of the famous table to the yoke he had made specially for his prized pair of oxen. These weren’t ordinary oxen, either. He had raised them from calves, feeding them a special diet and fussing over every aspect of their care. Whatever he had invested in them, they had paid him back splendidly and then some. They had grown into behemoths, winning every prize of every competition and were famous for their strength. Legend had it that they were so powerful that they had pulled a tractor back up and over the bluff from which it had careened into the gully below. They were so strong that even the truck drivers for the Appleton rum factory knew to call for them if one of their trucks went into a ditch and they didn’t want to call the company for a proper pull and risk getting a bad driving record. The farmer made sure he was well compensated for their labor, as well as for not calling the Appleton foreman.

On that fateful day, the farmer waited for the mermaid’s customary noon-time appearance, boasting that he would pen her in a well on his land and keep her as a curiosity, charging admission for people to see her. He delighted in imagining the gleam of her jewels glistening against his own skin. He even claimed to have prepared the exterior walls of his house in such a way that he could imbed in their surface her most precious possession—her pearls—to reflect the moonlight’s shimmer to light up his house so it could be seen for miles.

Turning the rope he would use to snare her over and over in his hands, he inspected it for any sign of weakness or disrepair. This was a rope he had made himself, choosing each strand with the utmost care, for this day alone. Satisfied that his rope was as perfect as could be and confident that he had overlooked nothing, he readied himself and his oxen for the easy task.

As soon as he saw her rising from the water, saw her seated behind her sparkling table, winding the golden comb through her silvery hair, he lassoed one of the table’s legs with his finely-made rope and tied it to his oxen’s yoke.

Being an arrogant man, he did not offer her the courtesy of a warning nor the opportunity of surrendering her treasure to him without harm: he just ordered his oxen 46

forward. The rope slapped up from the pond’s surface and shuddered taut, causing the table to jerk. But it did not move off its position. The oxen struggled forward, their shoulders straining against the yoke, sweat streaming down their hides. This was a heavier load than anticipated. Again and again, they heaved their weight against the wooden block that bound them together, their knees buckling as they fought their way forward, out from under the sting of the farmer’s whip. The table shuddered but did not move.

By now the oxen’s flesh was a bloody mess from the whip’s increasing fury, their shoulders cut purple from the strain against the yoke. Still the table did not move. The farmer, driven to rage by his failure and humiliation, plunged into the water’s edge, heaved a section of the rope over his shoulder and turned with it back to shore, intent on wrenching mermaid and treasure out of the pond himself.

Twenty minutes into the ordeal, his oxen were nearly dead.

They say what happened next was the mermaid’s magic.

Somehow, the yoke that by now had cut deeply into the oxen’s flesh from the resistance of the stubborn table, unexpectedly opened, freeing the two animals for the first time in their lives. The rope, which had been secured to the yoke with carefully labored triple knots, broke. The tension that had been exerted from the struggle between table and yoke now caused the rope to whip backwards, to streak towards the mermaid and her table with lightning speed. As it boomeranged, it caught the farmer by one of his arms, coiling itself around him like a snake. By this time, the mermaid had already begun her descent back into the safety of the water, taking her table and comb with her.

No one knows if she realized what was happening. Some say yes, that it was her vengeance on an arrogant and disrespectful man. Others are certain that no, she was too focused on escape, or oblivious to the mayhem around her.

In either event, as she and the comb and the table plunged to their watery kingdom, the rope still lassoed around the table’s leg carried the farmer down too, drowning him as he twisted and struggled to free himself from its carefully selected strands.

His body was never found.

Sightings of the mermaid grew more rare after that, even though many claimed that she still rose every midday to survey the pond’s surface, searching for her missing husband.

Those who saw her swore it was a gift for some virtue they possessed. Children still saw her with regularity, as did some of the elders, and, of course, the healers. But she no longer revealed herself as she had before. She had mastered the art of invisibility.

e reached down to brush the weight from his ankles,

to sweep off the pond grass that must have caught him

when he drew himself out of the water and only then noticed. It shimmered in the bright noon sunlight. His fingers closed over the small round bead and he knew before he examined it that he held a piece of her treasure—a pearl. This was no coincidence.Young men from Billy’s Bay didn’t just happen upon pearls. This was proof that he had not been dreaming.

She had given this to him; a reminder of what she had promised him if he would bring her news of her lost husband.

He wanted to help her. She was so beautiful and she had looked so sad. Could he be the one to make her happy again?

After all, she had chosen him. Out of all the possible men who came to Pondside in search of even a glimpse of the famous mermaid, she had chosen him. She must believe he could do it. And if he did, if he could discover the fate of her captain, his world would be forever changed. Out of all of the men who had been journeying here for generations, he would be the one to hear the music of her laughter, to gaze into her shimmering eyes, and to taste the salt of her lips.

He resolved to help her. School would be over in two weeks and he had the entire summer to devote to her. How difficult could it be to solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearance? He’d ask Kemron to come with him. They could start in White House, a two day’s walk from Treasure Beach.

They could start by talking to the famous ghost there. Surely a ghost would know if Alonso de Bonne-Maison were dead or alive. Or, at the very least, it could confer with its ghost friends to glean some information. How could they fail?

He remembered the tears on her cheeks and the wistful way she had looked at him. It would be alright. He would make it alright. He, Buju Strachan, loved the mermaid.

The Mermaid of Pondside Pondside, a small rural village in southwest Jamaica, is so named for the large pond that sparkles at its center. Apart from this geographical delight, Pondside is not much distinguished from its neighboring communities, except for one very special feature—its pond is home to a mermaid.

He imagined how everyone at school, teachers and students alike, would smile approvingly at him; how the men of his town would turn to nod to him as he walked the road home—“There he is,” they’d say, in voices tinged with envy and respect, “Buju Strachan, the man the mermaid loves.”

And the fishermen! The experts of the sea! Ha! No longer would they refuse to take him on the long journeys to Honduras in search of rich fishing grounds. He was loved by the mermaid. She would guide the boat to the quickest currents.

She would show them the most plentiful banks. She would...

I know this from the countless tellings of the folk tale I have heard from my Jamaican friends, from their friends, from their children and from adult acquaintances I meet each year when I visit.

The Mermaid of Pondside is my interpretation of this folk tale. I have remained true to the essence of the tale, although I have introduced characters in order to develop more fully the story line.

Throughout my narration, I have tried to capture the poetic lilt of Jamaican patois and the interplay of magic and reality that characterize these stories.

This is the first chapter of a larger work I plan to write based upon Jamaican folk tales. Each chapter will highlight a local legend as the two protagonists introduced here, Buju and Kameron, journey from Pondside to Kingston in search of the mermaid’s missing husband.

—Kristine Doll

Kim Mimnaugh

Kristine Doll is a Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Salem State College. She received her PhD from Brown University. Her last book co-authored with Robert E. Brown, was Elegies, a translation of poems by Joan Alcover. She found the writing of this tale to be as mysterious and exotic as the tale itself.

Piyapat (JuneBug) Raitim ’07 watercolor illustrations pages 42-45.

Matthew Strommer ’08 watercolor and colored pencil initials and illustrations pages 46-47.

47

P O E T R Y

Bill Coyle Anno Domini

A Bubble Burst

Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn...

So Jesus, far away and long ago, instructed his friends in holy unconcern.

Groggy with sleep this morning

They mustn’t have had squirrels in Palestine (note to self: look this up). In any case, he omitted them—their clutching sense of mine, mine being obviously out of place.

I like to sit here watching the local squirrels, The way they gather nuts, bury them, hide The spot with dirt and twigs, the way their quarrels chase them around and up a maple’s side, The way that they come closer when I call, And even when I don’t—the way they stand begging—year round but more so in the fall— prepared to take the food right from my hand.

One will eat each nut as it’s doled out; another will eat one and bury two; another takes a nibble of each nut, pauses and considers what to do.

Consider the squirrels of the park, they gather their nuts and steal their neighbor’s when they can.

Their plumpness presages the colder weather.

What careful, small, grey creatures. How like man.

When common sense requires that we fill our stores against the time of scarcity, how can He tell us in good conscience, Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee?

48

Ness meant Lake in Scottish— which it does not— and thinking I had a poem— or the end of one— I paused from doing dishes to jot down not much—two lines—but welcome after so long, only, an instant later, to see I’d been wrong.

Back at the dishes, clearerheaded, my dream of something great submerging in suds and steam, I cling to the lines; they’re catchy if meaningless, and nothing breaks the surface of Nothing Ness.

From The God of This World to His Prophet

Kim Mimnaugh

Treasure in heaven? Closer at hand, the ravens stalk glassy eyed through leaves of fallen gold, and homeless men lie sprawled out under heaven’s immense capacity for rain and cold.

I somehow thought

Bill Coyle’s poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, the New Republic, and Poetry. He is a translator from Swedish, and his versions of the poet Håkan Sandell have appeared in PN Review and Ars Interpres and are forthcoming in the anthology The Other Side of Landscape.

He teaches in the English Department at Salem State College.

B O O K S H E L F

Recent books and recordings by faculty and staff

Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class

Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in AmericanVisual Culture

The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1855–1872 Volumes 1 & 2

 Arthur Riss



Patricia Johnston, Editor

An Anthology of Nonviolence: Historical and Contemporary Voices Krishna Mallick, Co-editor

 J. D. Scrimgeour

Pierre A. Walker, Co-editor

  High the Mountain

Kenneth A. MacIver

How to Keep Your Children Safe: A Guide for Parents

 Yvonne M. Vissing

Teaching on Principle and Promise: The Foundations of Education Mary-Lou Breitborde and Louise Boyle Swiniarski



Veni Creator Spiritus and The Song Endures Philip Swanson

SSC_PUB_169/07

Beyond Access: Girls and Science

Kim Mimnaugh

Page 30

Science class at the Saltonstall School in Salem.

SEXTANT  Lafayette Street Salem, Massachusetts 