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The People Behind the Pill

The People Behind the Pill

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I’ve always been an earnest, note-taking reader, especially now that I’m in class again. But increasingly more I enjoy the sidetracks and detours of reading, the rabbit holes, the inefficient digressions. 

For the next paper, we’re analyzing the public reception of a specific scientific discovery, and I’ve chosen oral contraception. It’s a rich topic, so rich that I’m reading more than necessary. 

For instance, in The Birth of the Pill, author Jonathan Eig tells the stories of the four people who are most responsible for the development of the pill:

There is Gregory Pincus, a brilliant scientist with a flair for publicity searching for compounds in his ramshackle laboratory in Massachusetts; Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who coined the term “birth control” and crusaded for women’s freedom all her life; Katharine McCormick, heir to the Cyrus McCormick fortune, who funded the experiments; and Dr. John Rock, a gynecologist and devout Catholic who took on his church to help the women in his care.

Though a drug company was involved — G.D. Searle — the pill would not have been created without the  “courage and conviction of the characters involved,” Eig writes. The book is a vivid reminder of how human personalities forge the technologies we inherit. It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.

(Photo of Margaret Sanger courtesy Wikipedia) 

Ashland Park

Ashland Park

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There are places I visit so often in my imagination that I need to recharge the memories as you would a battery. I did some recharging today when I strolled through Lexington’s Ashland Park neighborhood.

There was Woodland Park with its baseball diamonds and picnic tables, then my old place on Lafayette, the first of several former houses I would visit today (the others I drove by rather than walked past).

I ambled down South Hanover and Fincastle, letting my mind wander, fantasizing what it would be like to live in some of these places, the grand brick colonials, the charming round-doored tudors.  

Till I reached Ashland itself, the home of 19-century statesman Henry Clay, which stopped my reveries in their tracks. Ashland with its shaded walks and formal garden. Ashland with its historic pedigree and bountiful acreage. Even in fantasy, Ashland is out of my league. 

The Luckiest Generation

The Luckiest Generation

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Dad would have been 97 today, a most beauteous day, as many of his birthdays were. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad’s generation, often called the “greatest.” I think you could make a case that it was one of the luckiest, too.

Born into a Depression, members of Dad’s generation were schooled in poverty and deprivation. They learned early to rely on themselves. Families were close then, and many were multi-generational.

Dad joined the Air Force before he was drafted, and thus began the most romantic and far-flung chapter of his life. He was a preacher’s kid from Kentucky who was suddenly touring European capitals (albeit from 25,000 feet while scrunched into the tail gunner’s seat of a B-17).

Afterward, Dad’s generation returned to sweethearts and GI loans and one of the greatest economic expansions of all time. They came back to joy and acclaim. They had saved the free world, after all. That’s a lot to do before the age of 30.

Medicine matured as they did. They lived much longer than they would have had there been no antibiotics or bypass surgery. Which is not to say they did not suffer. But most of them lived lives neatly tucked between the 1918 Flu and COVID-19.

Which means that, world-events-wise, Dad’s generation suffered more at the beginning of their life span than the end. They came of age expecting little and left this world with much. They didn’t have it easy, but they did have it early. One of the greatest generations? Absolutely. But one of the luckiest, too.

Underland

Underland

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Like the underworlds Robert Macfarlane plumbs in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, there is much going on beneath the surface in this marvelous new offering by one of my favorite authors. 

And there would have to be to combine prehistoric cave art, Parisian catacombs, the “wood wide web” (the fungal and rooted connectedness of trees in the forest), underground rivers, sweating icebergs and burial sites for nuclear waste — all in one book.

One theme that ties them together, besides Macfarlane’s exploration of them (no one is better than he at describing fear) is a growing recognition of the Anthropocene, the geologic age that experts have come to accept we are living through, one defined by human influence on the environment.

To comprehend the enormity of this designation, Macfarlane brings many tools to bear — literature, myth, science, philosophy and language, always language. “Words are world-makers — and language is one of the great geologic forces of the Anthropocene,” Macfarlane writes. But of the many terms for this “ugly epoch,” only one seems right with Macfarlane — “species loneliness, the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it.” 


“If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web,” he continues, “it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.”


And so the image at the heart of these pages, he explains, is that of an opened hand — extended in greeting, compassion, art — the prehistoric hand prints in ancient cave paintings and the touch of his young son’s hand. 


I know I will write more about this wonderful book; this is a start.

Modern Day MLK?

Modern Day MLK?

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We need another Dr. Martin Luther King, a modern-day voice crying in the wilderness. We need someone who has a positive vision and can motivate others to follow it; someone grounded in faith who has moral clarity. Someone who understands sacrifice and can inspire others to make one.

I think about how the world sometimes gives us the people we need when we need them. Abraham Lincoln to keep our nation together. King to lead the Civil Rights movement.

We don’t always treat our heroes well, of course. King and Lincoln were both assassinated. In their case history righted the wrong, and they ultimately received the honors they were due. But honor is not what they were seeking. It was a cause beyond themselves, a greater good.

It’s hard to imagine such a person appearing now, someone who could heal the partisanship, who could bind us together again as one nation. But I’m an optimist. I have to believe there might be.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Virginia is For …

Virginia is For …

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It’s been 50 years since the Old Dominion rolled out a new tourism campaign that went on to become one of the most successful ever. To celebrate this campaign, Virginia has placed more than 150 LOVE installations around the state. Seeing this one in Urbanna last weekend inspired me to do a little research.

“Virginia is for Lovers” has a contested history. Some say it was the original brainchild of a $100-a-week copywriter who came up with “Virginia is for history lovers” — until others in the Martin and Woltz agency out of Richmond (now the Martin Agency) decided to punch it up. Others say it was a more collaborative effort from the start.

Whatever the exact story, “Virginia Is For Lovers” is a classic example of less is more, because the removal of “history” gave the fusty state a whole new image. The campaign debuted with an ad in Bride’s Magazine in 1969, the year after the summer of love. And the rest really is … history.

Urbannahhhh!

Urbannahhhh!

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It’s really Urbanna, but I couldn’t resist adding a sigh of pleasure at the end. Where have all these sweet Virginia port towns been all my Virginia life?

Like Reedville, Irvington and Kilmarnock, Urbanna is a small place with a large footprint, large because its role in the beginning of American history gives it a certain heft. In all these small towns, homes and shops cluster around landings that became docks that became marinas that now lie sparkling in the sun. But before the sailboats and motorboats there were steamers and sailing ships, and the harbors and quays were where business was conducted, not pleasure.

To reach the Urbanna marina, for instance, you walk down Prettyman’s Rolling Road, one of the oldest thoroughfares in America, a historical marker says. The “rolling” was named for how 1000-pound hogbacks full of tobacco were moved from custom house to ships and from there to the motherland more than 3,000 miles away.

I walked instead of rolled. But once down the shaded lane, it was easy to imagine the bustle of yore because of the modern busyness.  It was a glorious late-summer day, and sailors, kayakers and sightseers all gathered at the harbor.

 I watched one sailboat motor slowly down Urbanna Creek on its way to the Rappahannock and, ultimately, the bay. It would be back by nightfall. It wasn’t traversing the Atlantic. But as the water gleamed and a breeze promised smooth sailing, it was easy to imagine otherwise.


(No wonder I like the town. I later read that it means “City of Anne,” which I should have figured out from my ninth-grade Latin. Named not for me, of course, but for England’s Queen Anne, most recently portrayed — and not prettily — in the movie The Favourite.”) 

Chesapeake Steamboats

Chesapeake Steamboats

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One of the reason I love to travel is that it opens up worlds you’d never know if you didn’t leave home. It’s not just seeing the sights and meeting the people. It’s imbibing the history and culture.

Things like the Chesapeake steamboat culture, for instance, which flourished from the 19th century into the 20th.  Boats plied the rivers, creeks and inlets of this watery world, picking up tobacco, produce, seafood — and people — and taking them to Baltimore or Norfolk. Neighbors would gather at the wharf when the boats made their return trip to retrieve the tools, lumber or lace they’d ordered from the big city.

Steamboats served as buses, ambulances, bars (you could get a drink on one during Prohibition) — and stages. The musical “Showboat” was based on an Edna Ferber story she wrote after spending time on the James Adams Floating Theater, which mostly plied the Chesapeake.  These floating stages might be the only live entertainment a family could count on all year long. It was a big deal when the Floating Theater came to town.

Chesapeake steamboats — until this afternoon, I never knew they existed.

(This is the pilots cabin from the steamer Potomac, which is being restored in the Irvington Steamboat Museum.)

Words That Live On

Words That Live On

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Yesterday would have been the 90th birthday of Anne Frank. Seventy-seven years ago, she received a diary for her 13th birthday, a diary she would fill with words that would live on for decades, and, most likely centuries, beyond her.

The contents were in many ways typical — conflicts with her mother, questions about her future. But it was written in 500 square feet of hidden space that Anne shared with her parents, sister and four other people. And it was written amidst the horrors of Nazi Europe.

“When I write, I can shake all of my cares,” Anne wrote in her journal. “My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived. But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something truly great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

Anne would die not long after her 15th birthday. The diary she called “Kitty” was left behind in the “Secret Annex.” She could not take it to Auschwitz or on to Bergen Belsen, where she and her sister died of disease and malnutrition shortly before Allies freed the concentration camps. But a family friend saved the journal, and gave it to Anne’s father, Otto, who eventually had it published. It would be translated into 70 languages and sell tens of millions of copies around the world.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” Anne wrote. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”

(Above: a page from Anne Frank’s Tales book. She also penned what she called The Book of Beautiful Sentences — copying passages of writing that she liked — started a novel and planned a book called The Secret Annex. Photo and information courtesy of the Anne Frank Museum website and The Writer’s Almanac.) 

The Boys in the Air

The Boys in the Air

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Today, as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, I think not just of the boys who stormed the beaches but also of the boys who flew above them. One of them was my dad.

Frank Cassidy was 20 years old when he took the trip of a lifetime, courtesy of the U.S. government. It was an all-expenses voyage to and from what Dad called “Jolly Old” England. He was stationed at a base outside the village of Horham in East Anglia.

On June 6, 1944, Dad had just turned 21. He had become adept at crawling into the tail-gunner’s seat of a B-17 bomber and firing the gun when necessary. That day, he and his crew would fly two missions, softening up enemy defenses, backing up the infantry, the men who were landing and dying on the beaches of Normandy.

Dad always insisted that what he did was nothing compared with them. “I don’t think the American people appreciate what some of those men did,” he told a newspaper reporter in 2009. “Those guys, they deserve all the honors.”

With all due respect, Dad, I disagree. I think you deserve the honors, too.