In your February/March issue James P. Johnson mentioned Mrs. Pearl Curran in connection with the Ouija board craze. Through her board she had made contact with one Patience Worth, a “creature” from some earlier time who often couched messages in Elizabethan idioms. When these messages came through with increasing speed, Mrs. Curran abandoned her board and learned to type to keep pace with her novel amanuensis.
Fifty-three years ago, in August 1930, I spent a jolly evening with Mrs. Curran and some acquaintances in the library of Gordon Ray Young, who was then, I believe, book review editor of the Los Angeles Times. Although unseen, Patience was the guest of honor and made her presence felt in a very lively manner.
Our host, Mr. Young, was a bearded wag who kept teasing Patience. To every one of his sallies she responded with quick wit. She referred to him with mild sarcasm as “bearded seer.” At one point, Young observed that she didn’t know everything, that she didn’t, for example, know chess. “Yet the gaming of life is a far wiser game,” she retorted. “To check a fool, to king a common fellow, to slay a pawn, this is living, sirrah!”
Several persons gave Mrs. Curran sealed envelopes. Patience would type a comment, and when the envelope was opened, she had each time paraphrased the contents or given an answer in her own fashion. Between times, almost incidentally it seemed, she turned out some very lyrical verses.
All the while she (Mrs. Curran) remained her own self on the side, a very pleasant but quite ordinary middle-aged woman who was far from well educated or well read but on good terms with her remarkably articulate dual personality. As Mrs. Curran, she seemed as bemused as were the rest of us by what was going on.
All that is far from the Ouija board, to be sure, but that was where it began.
Marshall B. Davidson
New York, NT.
Information, Please
I am currently doing research for a nonf iction book about the Ouija board. It is to be a balanced discussion of Ouija-board theory and phenomena. I would like to hear from anyone who has knowledge about the board’s origins or history. Please write to: Ouija—Box 109, Barnes & Noble Books, Harper & Row Publishing Co., Inc., 10 East Fifty-third Street, New York, NY 10022.
Andrew Piotrowski
Outdoor Priority
I enjoyed Walter Karp’s “Henry Francis du Pont and the Invention of Winterthur” in the April/May issue, but I want to challenge some of his statements about Mr. du Font’s gardening activities.
Mr. du Pont did not concentrate on the garden after the museum was created. Gardening was a lifelong pursuit carried out with the same obsession that characterized his collecting and display of antiques. Mr. du Pont worked in a local nursery while a student at Groton School, which, as you can imagine, caused quite a family scandal. He studied horticulture, botany, and landscape design at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University at the time when Boston was the horticultural mecca of America. Aside from raising dogs, the young du Font’s only concerns seem to have been ornamental plants and garden design. Upon his return to the family home at Winterthur in 1903, following college, he began extensive development of the gardens and grounds under the ever watchful eye of the colonel. Mr. du Pont was recognized as one of this country’s finest horticulturists and was invited to be a “foreign member of honour” at the Royal Horticultural Society’s International Exhibition of 1912.
Unfortunately, ignorance of Mr. du Font’s horticultural accomplishments has led to the present status of the magnificent gardens at Winterthur as an adjunct, a side-attraction, to the museum.
Valencia Libby
Longwood Fellow and
Garden Historian
University of Delaware
Spelling Counts
I have one small correction to make concerning the article “The Essex Disaster” (April/May). The seventeen-year-old Thomas Nicholson was actually Thomas Nickerson. I believe the spelling error was originally made by Captain Chase in his Narrative of the Whaleship Essex.
It might also interest you to know that Nickerson, too, wrote down the story of the shipwreck in his own words—and that his memoirs are at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Incidentally, I am a proud member of the Nickerson Family Association of Cape Cod.
Timothy Mangham
Elk Grove, Calif.
Jacobsen’s Quinnebaug
Everyone in love with the ocean and America’s marine heritage had to be delighted with your special section. For me there were two extra pleasures. First, I had purchased an Antonio Jacobsen painting about a year ago. So “A Painter of Floating Property” told me more about him than I had known before.
Then turning to “The Great North Sea Mine Barrage,” I was amazed to find that my painting (done in 1912) of the Old Dominion Line’s S.S. Jefferson was the same ship that became the Navy’s Quinnebaug, Admiral Mannix’s ship in the story.
I understand that the Jefferson was built in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1889, so it’s easy to realize why she was tired in 1917. I’m also aware that Jacobsen often did several paintings of the same ship (one for the owner, one for the captain, etc.), and there were two for sale when I bought mine. I’m looking for a discreet way to display AMERICAN HERITAGE beneath the painting with the two stories paper-clipped together.
John J. Collins
Commissioner
Michigan Historical Commission
Marshall, Mich.
Mine Aftermaths
Your marvelous account of “The Great North Sea Mine Barrage” (April/May 1983) rang a bell in my memory. One morning in the spring of 1965 a small freighter was plodding up the English Channel when a lookout spotted a large black object in the water. The freighter sheered off and radioed Dover, which sent a patrol boat to investigate.
The black object was gingerly hauled in and identified as a mine from the old North Sea barrage. It had apparently ripped loose in a storm at the end of 1918 and drifted round and round the British Isles with the currents for fortysix years, incredibly without hitting anything. Its three hundred pounds of TNT were still deadly too.
The First World War mine barrage also led to strained relations with Norway, as the port of Stavanger was virtually cut off. To compensate for this, together with payment for Norwegian ships requisitioned in American ports, the United States paid Norway $11 million dollars in 1919.
