In The Shadow Of Blue Mountain: Lives And Letters Of A Remarkable Family - Volume II, 1946-1962

By Ronald J Brickman

IN THE SHADOW OF BLUE MOUNTAIN: LIVES AND LETTERS OF A REMARKABLE FAMILY - Volume II, 1946-1962 chronicles the personal histories of three members of the Hollingshead family: the father, Charles Anton, the daughter, Elma Kathleen (known throughout her adult life by her nickname Bim), and the youngest son, Roger Howerth. The author's life (indicated throughout as Ronnie) is inevitably included, as it became intimately intertwined with theirs. All people present in this book series share a special bond: They spent a significant part of their lives on an orchard property in the idyllic mountain town of West Point, California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Writer Cosmos
• Release date: Jan 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224962570

Book preview

CHAPTER XI: THE POST WAR YEARS, 1946-1949

In this chapter, one learns that Bim left her high-level position in the State Department and life in the nation’s capital to become a homemaker, caregiver, and farmer on her father’s property in the mountains of rural California. The transition was not without its difficulties. The problem was not so much Charles, who seemed to show considerable solicitude toward his daughter and her needs, at least at first. Nor was it the physical environment, about which Bim continued to rhapsodize. Rather, it was Bim’s inability to shed the intellectual energy and perceptiveness that led her to so much success in her abandoned career. She struggled to deploy these same talents in new pursuits while fulfilling her more mundane duties on the farm. She attempted to write publishable material and launch an ambitious program of public education on foreign policy. She continued to read up on current events, including the daily New York Times and weekly Time Magazine. She even tried her hand at poetry. But it was in her letter-writing that her talents continued to flourish.

There was also a last flare-up of the Bim-Slim romance, causing Bim much heartache. In a few years, however, she met and married a local chiropractor, Doc Brockman, who afforded her a bit of happiness, financial security, intellectual stimulation, and an infusion of new energy into the farm and household projects.

With Bim now living with her father on the West Point farm, the rich correspondence that sustained their relationship for some 28 years—their letter-writing seemed to be at its best when they were writing to each other—came to an end. From now on, there are letters between them only on the rare occasion when one or the other was away from West Point. Letters to Roger and Inge in Rome continued, however, especially during the year when mother Jen lived with them, as did Bim’s letters to her friend Mildred Biddick. Former colleague Sam Welles became a regular correspondent and helped to keep Bim on her toes intellectually and literarily. Given Bim’s compulsion to make copies of all her letters, the family archives remain full of letters to these correspondents and others.

Fortunately, Bim also continued to write a diary. The entries were no longer about office politics, coping with Washington’s weather and housing difficulties, lunches with friends and colleagues, and an occasional concert. Instead, they were notes about plants and animals around the farm, dealings with an irascible father, being a reluctant homemaker in an 80-year-old house, encounters with neighbors, and, as Bim started to take on piano students toward the end of the decade, insights into the progress and personality quirks of her pupils.

Here are the entries in Bim’s diary, reproduced verbatim, covering the first four days of her return to California in 1946:

March 8 (Friday). Bim arrived, alas! Little Cat stayed away all day. (He knows.) May and Claude arrived (in Stockton) about 9:40. Almonds and many other things ablooming, people without heavy (or even any) coats. Lunch at Lodi, then home. What a clean house (Gloria and grandma).

Get much small and disheartening school gossip. Town split infinite ways (but rather solidly anti-Peninah and wholly anti-Thiesson).

March 9 (Saturday). Dad prunes. I try to unpack, straighten out. To town for mail. Grand day. Different greetings from town. I am going to set school straight, mothers think. Dad entranced over a not so good dinner on Stupell plates. Get rid of red oilcloth, ha!

March 10 (Sunday). This is a nice spot. Call on Dot [president of the school board], but she isn’t home. Coffee at restaurant and to church, dammit. Wonderful cool, sunny morning, heavy clouds in afternoon. To May’s for dinner (corned pork). Wear scarlet sweater and feel better. Home to bathe. Hear tail end of concert, Death of Isolde—unsettling music for single people.

Little Cat comes in tonight. Throw out wall oilcloth, too.

March 11 (Monday, first day of school). It was worse than anticipated—with an infinitely awful tomorrow of having to handle three grades in utter ignorance. Grand, cold day. Am dog-tired and discouraged over inability to learn what I must teach. Can’t think. I’d just as soon die as live through tomorrow.

There are no more entries in Bim’s diary until March 30, when she announced that she had written a circular to her family and friends. The circular in question is a five-page, single-spaced typed screed which Bim addressed TO ALL MY FRIENDS (BUT PLEASE DON’T CIRCULATE AMONG MY ENEMIES), summarizing Bim’s experiences and thoughts after just three weeks in West Point. She warned her readers: This is no letter. Call it Fragments of a Burst Mind and Creakings of an Exhausted Body.

One of the recipients was Sam Welles, still working for Time Magazine. Sam was sufficiently impressed with major parts of the circular that he arranged to have them published, with some editorial changes (namely to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent) and considerable abridgment in the April 15, 1946 issue of Time Magazine, thereby reaching a national audience. We reproduce here the article in full:

Some 3,550,000 U.S. children go to old-fashioned country schools with only one or two teachers. Whether the schooling they get is good or not depends largely on the wisdom and understanding of these teachers (who usually earn less than $100 a month).

Recently a woman of 40, who had never taught before, took a school-teaching job in a West Coast small town. After three weeks of it, she wrote a circular letter to her friends. Excerpts:

There are circuses of one, two and three rings. I run, or attempt to run, a three-ringer. Only there are no cages and no whips (whips would leave marks, anyway). I have 43 performers in my circus: eleven in the fifth grade, 14 in the fourth, 18 in the third. The total arena is 32 by 23 feet. Except for two or three third graders, none of the little animals have had trainers. They had a teacher three months of this year; she is now in a mental home. Not that the children drove her crazy; she just was getting crazy anyway.

I didn’t believe in corporal punishment. Many other people don’t too. Were the children surprised (I was also) when I soundly thumped three boys my second day out. It works, if combined with other methods. Nothing else will. I’ve got down to about one licking a day now and hope soon to dispense with them altogether. I see signs of progress and even civilization. So far, the beatings have caused no rumpus; in fact, the town is delighted.

Worst Experience. Snowballing close around the schoolhouse and on the well-trodden path between school and outhouses is forbidden. There is an enormous field beyond, in which snowballing is tolerated, if not actively encouraged. When I arrived at the front gate one morning, some of my little angels were snowballing some other little angels just in back of school. I went out and thumped three of them. Fate at that moment sent the eighth-grade boys out to snowball the second graders right under our noses. This is known as being On the Spot. Oh yeah, my children say, you spank us little guys but you don’t dare touch the big ones! Oh, don’t I? says I. I went out and politely told the big boys that they knew the rules.

Whereupon they threw some more snowballs, including a few in my direction. I chose the biggest boy I could find (6 ft. 1 in.), hit him as hard as I could, was sworn at, slapped him again, and stood my ground until he slunk off to tell the principal on me. That ended snowballing in the Wrong Place. I had to go out next recess into the field and throw snowballs, just to show I could take it.

Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic. Arithmetic is not so bad, although I cannot multiply as fast as befits a teacher. But writing, my friends! Especially on blackboards! As I was putting some questions on the board, I heard one child whisper to another: Gee, she writes terrible! I agreed out loud and told them nobody had taught poor little me to write, and that they’d have to help me. But my greatest hold on the circus is Dramatic Reading. Apparently, they have always been read to in a monotone, for they find my delivery most enchanting. So the offer is: a half-hour’s story-reading a day, minus time wasted in waiting for them to come to order during the day. The minute I stand still and start staring at the clock, the refractory few become unpopular. I get lots of help in quieting down the room that way.

Geography. Not one understood one iota of the geography books they had been reading. I have practically stopped all formal geography (of which I know nothing anyway), and we have spent the first weeks learning what north, south, east & west mean and what a map is. We are studying our town; soon we shall be able to get a faint idea of the county.

Limits of Human Endurance. The color of my meditations depends somewhat on the time of day. Every morning at 6 I cry sleepily, Oh, God, let me die! I cannot face it! After breakfast, I trudge up the hill wondering how I can bear to face the brats, racking my overwrought brain as to how I can keep each class busy throughout the long, long day. Every evening I come home full of wonderful stories, some funny, some sad as hell, and filled with new ideas on how to get an idea into the poor little heads. Then, after dishes, I start to work on next day’s plans. At 10, or more frequently midnight, I creep to bed like a licked cur, only to dream of teaching. How I hate it and how I love it.

How I love the kids, especially the worst of them—little Tommy who seems a perfect moron but has something in him that one longs to get out. My great days are those when Tommy suddenly comes to human life. The three Mathews children, whose home is run by a woman not their father's lawful wife, who has no time to care for children even when they are sick. They have ceased to be problems and are my best students now. And so many others—poor, underprivileged, mishandled creatures, and so worth careful attention. That is what makes it all so damnably hard. How can one teacher give 43 children the time and attention they need?

But if the above complaint sounds as though I were bitterly   repenting, it is misleading. I am having a wonderful time,   except I am tired. But most people are.

In other parts of the letter, Bim related that she had talked the school board into hiring another teacher, who would handle the fifth and six grades in rooms borrowed from the neighboring church.

What precipitated the decision was the rumor that I was on the verge of a physical, if not mental, breakdown—a rumor carefully fostered by myself and helped along by the anxiety of my paternal parent. I am not anywhere near a breakdown (you can’t break down through all the fat I have put on without eating very much more than a horse should), though I do wonder frequently whether I can live through another day.

In the same letter from which this article was excerpted, Bim gives some additional details of her new life:

Dad reads the paper for me and keeps me informed at mealtime of major developments. The New York Times is stacked up in the attic. I dipped into the last two issues of Time—congratulations, Sam—but dipped only. I have not forgotten the world, but I have no time for it. No wonder it is going to pot!.

Church: Damn it, yes! I have gone every Sunday since I arrived. I’m trying to talk Dad into representing the family tomorrow. I went for him last week. We’ve got a new preacher—he speaks good English and is a fine actor and storyteller. But he says amen at the end of the offertory and in between everything else, and his unbelievable wife (who renders on the accordion) says amen at the strategic points in his sermon. Also, I can see she is working up to a come forward and be saved scene, and I don’t trust myself...I really am entitled to a day off tomorrow...

Dad is well and very glad I am here, though aside from cooking for him I am of little use. I scarcely touch the piano and I talk only a little bit on Saturdays. He is being saintly this evening in allowing me to write to all of you instead of playing or talking to him. The poor man insists on doing the breakfast dishes. I know it takes him an hour, and he and his huge kettle of water get in my way before I’ve packed my lunch pail. Yes, I have to take my lunch to school and am supposed to remain there until evening. Actually, I have, with the connivance of the principal, trotted home for a moment (and a smoke) almost every day, feeling that I would go crazy if I didn’t get away from the noise a moment. My room is so damnably crowded, and the little brats do so love to cluster around my desk. What a long, long cry from the ivory tower! Having an aged father is a fine excuse, isn’t it? The Good Teacher [Peninah] takes a dim view of this; the principal (who would love to go home for a small drink but lives too far away) thinks it fine and each day comes in to offer to take charge of my barracks for twenty minutes. Is it any wonder I love her?

Bim’s diary entries of this period also contain this short notation: Write to Slim, tear it up.

Bim’s next diary entries are brief. A few clarified her experience with Time Magazine. When on April 6 she received a telegram from Sam Welles offering to publish parts of the letter, she asked: "My circular to sell to Time? Whatever for? She followed up with an entry on April 12: After supper Dad reaches Education in Time, finds my letter. Odd feeling to read me in print. Pretty badly written, too."

In a letter of April 6 to Sam Welles, Bim gave this update on pupil Johnny Dunn (Tommy in Time’s version):

Johnny Dunn’s poor old mother told me yesterday I was to lick Johnny or do anything I could so’s he’d larn [learn] something. I told her Johnny had read beautifully in class the last day: he did, too! Gosh, what a thrill! The kids applauded and I congratulated him and his eyes sparkled with pride. It was one of Life’s Rare Moments.

Resuming the diary entries:

April 10: Too angry to speak to 4th grade last hour. I keep forgetting how immature the immature are. Were they ever impressed by anger! Anger on baseball field, too, with threat of no baseball for a week if any more quarrels. It (kinda) works.

June 14 (Friday): Hurray, hurray, school’s over. The play was good. Anyhow I thought so. [Bim apparently put on a play with her pupils to end the school year and it was a big hit, but there are few details in the files. One learns only that Bim authored it, which amazed the attending parents.] Only occasional short entries after then, including this harkening-back commentary of July 9: "Get glummer and glummer as I read NY Times on Italy treaty as worked out at Paris. Christ!"

Diary entries from July 9 to July 15 chronicle the Decline and Death of Little Cat. The last:

Little Cat goes on his last hunt this morning, poor buddy. We bury him the late afternoon, his tail so tenderly Dad-straightened. He gets the Rain Prelude [Chopin] and Pathétique [Beethoven]. How we miss him.

The day afterward, Elsie, the two Jerries (Meyers) and Bim took Charles to Oak Knoll, the Naval Hospital in Oakland, for treatment of his eyes. On July 18, Roy called to say that Dad was in a ward with young sailors who called him Pop and took care of him. He got treatments every hour on the first day, and every four hours on the next day. Alone at home, Bim refused all invitations and played the piano till almost midnight, climaxed by Pizzetti’s woeful songs, her current enthusiasm.

Charles managed to write a perfectly legible letter by hand to Bim shortly after his operation on July 24. Here is the relevant information:

As nearly as I understand the diagnosis, the ducts that carry the fluid from the eyeballs have become obstructed so setting up a pressure on the eyeballs, enlarging the pupils which cuts down vision. The doctor in personal charge of my case says I will never have full vision but plenty of usual vision but for this, I must carry on home medication for the duration.

On July 25, Bim brought Dad up to date on doings around the farm. She apologized for the jumpy style of the letter, explaining that she was making plum butter at the same time, and it required frequent stirring. She continued:

And it’s plum butter, not canned plums, because of the status quo of the eternal triangle Birds-Farmer-Fruit. The agreement I have reached with the birds—a euphemism for the terms the birds have forced on me—is one-third for them, two-thirds for me. That isn’t too bad as regards quantity, but I don’t like their method of distribution. I’d rather have my two-thirds in whole fruit instead of having just two-thirds of each plum, but they argue that one party or the other might get poorer plums otherwise. I say it is merely an application of the law of he-who-pecks-first, and to even up the score I pick some pretty green plums. [Bim’s plum-butter efforts apparently came before the invention of the slow cooker, which is the easiest and safest way to reduce thick fruit purees without the need to stir.]

Bim took advantage of her father’s absence to get some serious practice in on the piano, focusing on Cramer’s studies. Also, discussions were rampant all over town over who would teach school, and which grades, in the fall. Bim was still in the running but had decidedly mixed emotions about it. In a letter to her former colleague Ham in the State Department, she mentioned:

I wish I weren’t going to teach again next year, much as I am fascinated by it. I wanted to go into writing—or at least take a year to seeing whether I can or not. But the shortage of teachers is so appalling that even if I do teach we don’t quite know what we’ll do with the school this year....

[While Dad is at Oak Knoll] I am running the farm or trying to. It takes care of itself pretty well at the moment but needs somebody here on the spot. Can you think of me all alone in a broken-down farmhouse, rising shortly after dawn and going to bed around midnight, housewifing, gardening, picking fruit, and between times trying to practice the piano? Well, it certainly keeps my mind off the Italian treaty—most of the time...

You can probably imagine that all my emphasis here has been on trying to develop a civic consciousness. One reason I could bring myself to leave the Department was increasing awareness that there is little or nothing to be done about the US foreign policy until the people wake up. And the more I ponder things, the more I believe that it is no use pounding my distracted conjectures in your ear or eye. Suffice it to say that if my small children do not learn that (a) nothing can be had for nothing, (b) that the problem of one is the problem of all, (c) cooperation pays and quarreling doesn’t, and (d) courage is the indispensable factor—it won’t be my fault. I try to teach them lots of things; but character comes first in my room.

On August 5, neighbor Claude gave Bim a tutorial on thinning apples. She thinned, until feet will bear no more. Neighbor Porteous delivered a box of kittens: Poor, dirty, frightened creatures! He calls ‘em his Little Pigs. The next day, she noted that the kittens feel much tamer after tuna. Pink one stares at me with such amazement. ‘What is this great, clumsy creature which feeds such delectable things and doesn’t hurt a kitten,’ he wonders. By August 7, Cats begin to take over farm. The pink one was christened Wild Bill Hickock, who for years was Bim’s favorite.

Her first diary entry (August 10): When Wild Bill wants to be petted, he wants it—both hands, please, and he looks one so fully in the face. Sooner or later, the other kittens are given names: Lo Straniero, Lo the Poor Indian, Rusty and Blue Smith, Boots, ‘Fraid Cat.... Ownership was unofficially shared with the Smiths next door, and it was not clear who belonged to whom.

Charles returned with Roy [his oldest son] on August 11. On August 17, Bim and Dad were visited by Bob and Jane Barr, friends from Fruita days. Bim complained that Jane talked all the time, so she never got to listen to the menfolk. Otherwise, Bim and Charles’s days were filled with tending