Harry Pearson was walking to the Sno-White Cafe for lunch with someone else from the Pine Bluff Commercial. "Greenberg sure has been getting arrogant since he won the Pulitzer," he said.
"Well, Harry, that's something, coming from you," said his lunch companion.
"But I've always been arrogant. I said Greenberg's been getting arrogant."
...
This week I've been scanning the letters to the editor to see if anyone detected an anachronism in my mention of Kung Fu in relation to the Boxer Rebellion.
If I was wrong, no one noticed or called me out. The letters to the editor are all aflame because a politician from Hope declared that her children keep her humble, and that another politician wants humility for lack of natural issue.
Oh, that Florence King were alive and writing. No one but the author of "Spinsterhood is Powerful" is qualified to comment on the hour of the childless cat lady. What would she tell us? Maybe that honest arrogance is preferable to professed humility, so give us a Harry Pearson any day. After all, he did the real work of showing up and persuading the people of Arkansas (via the Pine Bluff Commercial) that the Buffalo River was worth saving from the Corps of Engineers.
...
The memory of trying to learn mathematics is a fine source of humility. Even high school geometry was hard, though the class gave me time to gaze out at the Shenandoah Valley from a hilltop fine arts building named after Bertie Murphy Deming, whose father founded the Murphy Oil Corporation of El Dorado, Ark.
I do not yet know if Noah Fields Drake surveyed south Arkansas for oil, only that he was largely responsible for the discovery of the Kibler gas field east of Fort Smith in November 1913, as well as the Clarksville and Lavaca gas fields.
So far I have looked through only six or seven of the 42 boxes in the Noah Fields Drake collection at the University of Arkansas. Outside of the main collection, a single box holds photocopies of letters that Drake sent to John Casper Branner, whose papers are held in the archives of Stanford University. Most are from Drake's first three years in China.
Drake wrote his former professor as his boat from San Francisco approached Honolulu; the grippe (flu) had kept him in bed for two days and two nights, but had also kept him from noticing any sea sickness. Recently I wrote that Drake began teaching at Imperial Pei Yang University on March 17, 1898; that was actually the date of his arrival in Tientsin.
"About the only part of the voyage that I liked," Drake wrote Branner, "was that part in which we were not voyaging, or in other words, the stops we made were my times of enjoyment." He saw Honolulu, Yokohama, Tokyo, Kobe, Nagasaki, and Shanghai, and was quite impressed by the wooden shoes and terraced gardens he saw in Japan.
He was surprised to find that Shanghai was "a finer-looking city than one usually sees in America," though only the foreign part near the wharves. The Chinese part of the city he found to be filthy.
"The country in China that I have seen," he wrote, "appears to be one immense garden and graveyard. Agricultural products are cultivated in small, irregular plots of bedded ground. Graves (coffins covered with dirt so as to make mounds of various sizes from a little larger than the coffin to about 25 feet in diam[eter]) are to be seen everywhere, but often they are so thick as to take up almost all the ground or make a solid graveyard."
In Tientsin he found a foreign population of 600-700, almost all business people and diplomats. (He does not mention missionaries, though he later married one.) The foreigners all lived in "fine or at least very good substantial houses."
Much of the correspondence with Branner consists of making arrangements with him to ship teaching materials, including papers that Drake published and the ill-fated original relief map and plaster cast of California, and fossil specimens for a teaching museum.
He regretted painting his relief map green, he told Branner, since others did not seem to like it, but "if those fellows had lived in western Texas, Nevada, Idaho, and Tientsin as much as I have, they would like to see some country that really looks green and fresh.
"The climate of Tientsin is rather trying for foreigners," he wrote. "The numerous sand storms fill the rooms with dust and sand until you can hardly keep anything free from dirt. People who are inclined to be nervous are more or less irritable during these storms, and nearly everyone feels more or less wilted," though the storms did seem to purify the city's outdoor areas.
"The Emperor has lately issued several edicts radical in change from past customs," Drake wrote in July 1898. "The Emperor is going to visit Tientsin this fall. Such a thing as the Emperor leaving his prison-like dwellings at Peking seems startling to the people here. He will probably visit the university." This is Drake's first mention of the cultural tension that would explode two years later in the Boxer Rebellion.
Did the Boxers call their mixture of magic and martial arts Kung Fu? If anyone can enlighten me, please write.