Saturday
Jun. 26, 1999
Pretty Halcyon Days
Poem: "Pretty Halcyon Days," by Ogden Nash, from I Wouldn't Have Missed It: The Selected Poems of Ogden Nash (Little, Brown and Co.).
It's British author BARBARA SKELTON's birthday, in Maidenhead, England, 1918, best remembered for her two memoirs, Tears Before Bedtime, and Weep No More.
It's the birthday in Norfolk, Virginia, 1915, of CHARLOTTE ZOLOTOW, author of some 60 children's books, beginning in 1944 with The Park Book, and including The Storm Book, and Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present.
It's the birthday in Gloucester, England, 1914, of writer LAURIE LEE, who wrote several volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories, but is best known for his three autobiographies, Cider with Rosie (1959), about growing up in the English countryside; As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, about his trip into London as a young man to seek his fortune; and A Moment of War, when he went to Spain during the '30s to fight in the Civil War.
PEARL BUCK, author of The Good Earth, was born on this day in Hillsboro, West Virginia, 1892, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. Buck spent nearly all her first 40 years in China. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for The Good Earth, and the Nobel Prize in 1938.
It's the birthday in Oakland, California, 1891, of SIDNEY HOWARD, the playwright of They Knew What They Wanted, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. It became the basis of Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella.
It was on this day in 1870, that the first section of the ATLANTIC CITY BOARDWALK was opened along the New Jersey beach. The area had been under development since about 1850, and had become a popular summer resort. Beautiful beaches, fresh sea air, luxurious hotels, and a connecting railroad line from Camden, New Jersey, drew visitors from all over the world. One problem, though, was that the tourists tracked sand from the beaches everywhere they went. The city built an eight-foot-wide wooden walkway from the beach into town to solve the problem.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®