corny jokes in elevators

 

So - Jackie had been dating the stockbroker John Husted during 1951, the same year when she met John Kennedy for the first time.  In December of 1951, Jackie and Mr. Husted got engaged.

        They broke their engagement, however, four months later, in March of 1952.

        All the while, Jackie worked at her newspaper job, providing photographs and interviews for her own daily column.

--------------- [excerpts from Camera Girl] --------------------- In order to turn out a column that was provocative enough to satisfy a diverse readership, she drew her inspiration from a variety of sources, pulling from her personal interests or breaking wire-service news.  She'd take an argument debated in the office and see if it would similarly incite pedestrians.

       Frank Waldrop recalled that she had both an unpredictable way of thinking that led to provocative questions and an instinct for asking what would have been on the minds of most readers.  Sometimes he thought, "Where does she come up with this stuff?" concluding that her reading a random range of topics fed her imagination.  

When the newsroom encyclopedia "B" volume went missing he found she'd kept it at her desk, studying the entry for "Bolivia."  When he told her he would teach her how to play the so-named card game, she responded, "No, the country."...

        Jackie sought to do more than entertain.  She wanted to inspire and educate, consistently offering readers a chance to better understand exasperating behavior ("Why do you think people put off Christmas shopping until the last minutes?"  "Why do you think so many people crack corny jokes in elevators?"  "Do people welcome constructive criticism?") 

and develop greater empathy ("What is the greatest need of people in the world today?"  "What are people most living for?"  "What do you first notice about people when you meet them?  Do you find that you often have to change your first impressions?").  She even managed to pose a few existential questions ("What came first, the chicken or the egg?"  "What is the best age?")....

Chapter 20

A SECOND DINNER

May - June 1952

        By all accounts, it was during the May 8, 1952 gathering at the Bartletts', in the same house where Jackie and Jack had met almost exactly a year earlier, when their deeper connection took hold.

        Not long after the dinner, Jack Kennedy would tell people how he "leaned across the asparagus and asked her for a date."  Her retort:  "There was no asparagus that night."  It was a bit of stagy banter, like two actors playing against type, Jack the romantic and Jackie the realist. ...

        It was after this dinner that Jack began mentioning Jackie to his family.  All of them, except his mother, had casually met her in Palm Beach five months earlier.  Jack made no mention of her appearance or social status but rather "the column she wrote," as Teddy recalled.  

"He got a real kick out of it and he had a few he clipped and showed members of the family.  It demonstrated her utterly unique way of thinking about the world.  He told her that he read it all the time."

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guess who's coming to dinner

 

Charles and Martha Bartlett home, in Washington, D.C.

------------------ [excerpts from Camera Girl, The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy] ------------------------------

1951.

She accepted an invitation from Charlie and Martha Bartlett to an informal Sunday supper on Mother's Day, May 13, in their narrow 3419 Q Street house.  They promised her that another guest would be there whom they insisted she just had to meet, whom Charlie had tried but failed to arrange her meeting earlier in the year.  He kept trying....

In fact, Charlie Bartlett had first tried to introduce them at his brother David's 1947 wedding, where they were both guests.  His friend was the war hero, author, and Democratic congressman John F. Kennedy. ...A Harvard University graduate and a Catholic, he was running for Congress when he met Charlie in 1946, and they became friends the next year when he was a freshman congressman and Charlie was a Washington newspaper correspondent....

        When she arrived at the May dinner, Jackie Bouvier knew more about the congressman's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, than about him.  Joseph Kennedy had been in the papers and on newsreels since she was a child.

        ...Jackie wrote later, "When I met Jack Kennedy, that strange laughing, amused and intelligent inquisitive - rather irreverent face - I remember him so well that nite at the Bartletts - I knew that man would have a profound and disturbing effect on my life.  

        I was rather frightened of him - because I knew if he came towards me, I wouldn't have the power to run away - though it would probably be better if I did.  He didn't look like someone who wanted to get married and I pictured heartbreak but it seemed worth it. . . . That is how we met and parted."

-----------------------------------------------------

{Camera Girl, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony.  Copyright 2023.  Gallery Books, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.}

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busy

 

------------------- [excerpt from Camera Girl] -------------------------

Chapter 17

OUT ON THE STREET

February 1952

 

Her desk was a mess.  She had a typewriter sitting on top of it on which she pecked out her bundle of daily quotes, a tedious exercise for someone untrained as a typist, accustomed to handwriting everything.  

A jumble of pencils and pads were strewn around the machine.  She was, by Waldrop's account, apparently too focused on meeting her daily deadline to worry about keeping a neat desk.  

        "She concentrated on the question of the day.  She listened carefully," he said.  She treated it as a business, small, but important enough as a start in a writing career.  She was just very serious."  

Picture editor Larry Jacobs shared her desk, where she kept transcripts of interviews to be used for future columns, bits of factual research, or provocative quotations for future questions in a bottom drawer.  He recalled it as being "pretty full" and "looking much as though a recent hurricane had hit it a good deal of the time."

        Running late for filing one day, she coaxed an acquaintance and NBC Radio employee, Everette Severe, whom she also interviewed, back to her office to help her compose a column.  Observing her process from interviewing to finalizing, he described her as "very efficient" with "energy and initiative"....

        ...Jackie invested considerable time in determining how to turn the confines of a traditionally mundane column into a refreshing bit of wisdom, wit, poignancy, and news.  In a relatively short time, she would develop a rhythm that captured her quirky sensibilities and make public the unpredictable person who always lay beneath the veneer of glamour.

        As she later reflected, "Like politics, there was no routine.  No two days were ever the same.  I loved every minute of it."

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Jackie tries a dog house job

 

------------------ [excerpt from Camera Girl] -----------  "I knew I needed a new Inquiring Photographer - the kid who was doing it was a stringer who was quitting to go to law school," Waldrop recalled.

        The problem was that nobody wanted the job.  "We used to joke about being in the dog house when we were assigned to the Inquiring Photographer spot," recalled one reporter.  "They preferred to sit in a bar someplace rather than snap mugshots of people standing on street corners answering stupid questions.  

        Nobody could fathom anyone wanting the job and agreeing not only to pose the questions but take the pictures."  In fact, the "Inquiring Photographer" never carried a byline, because the columnists were always rotating; nobody did it regularly enough to make it their own.

        "I'll tell you what we'll do" Waldrop told Jackie.  "You can try out for this thing."  He told her to keep going out with the stringer but ask her own question once a week and submit the responses on a trial basis.

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"...No pressure..."

 

[excerpts from Camera Girl, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony] -------------- Reviewing her early writings during her train ride from New York to the Kingston, Rhode Island, station near Newport, would remind Jackie that she not only had a gift for adapting the events of her life into fictionalized stories but had always relied on doing so, particularly as a way of responding to the unpleasant incidents of her life, including her parents' divorce. ...

        On October 2, 1950, Jacqueline Bouvier began her first day at George Washington University, navigating around the urban campus in D.C.'s Foggy Bottom neighborhood.  Its buildings were a hodgepodge of converted nineteenth-century homes, dormitories built in the 1930s, and a new Student Union Hall....

        Most American College students attended one school; this was Jackie's third.  Most seniors had already taken general study classes.  She was changing majors which meant a heavier workload.  Her class was 40 percent women, but her commitment to graduating made her an anomaly in an era when those who got a diploma instead of a fiance were considered socially unsuccessful.

        Despite her having to live under Mummy's thumb and commute to school, GWU proved an ideal environment.  Many of her striving middle-class classmates were the first in their families to attend college, often on the G.I. Bill, and she shared their view that education was the path to success.  By not returning to a college dominated by her social peers, most focused on marriage, she spared herself their judgment.  During her year at GWU, she unapologetically demonstrated her intellect and drive.

------------------------------------------------

... Now [after Jackie's graduation] it seemed that Janet felt the time had come for Jackie to do as she wanted and find a husband.

        Jackie was well aware of how many of her peers were engaged without the anxiety of Mummy harping on the subject of potential spouses.

... During the winter social season, elite Washington families sent their adult children to the weekly Mrs. Shippen's Dancing Class at the Sulgrave Club on Dupont Circle.  As Gore Vidal recalled, students were taught "to deport themselves in such a way that in due course they would marry someone from the dancing class . . . and settle down to a decorous life."

        One Shippen's event Jackie attended with Mummy and Unk that winter was the St. Valentine's Day dance.  There she met John Husted, a tall, blond, handsome New York banker, and a guest of his aunt, Helen Husted.  His parents knew the Auchinclosses and also Daddy.  

John had gone to St. Paul's prep school in New Hampshire, then Yale; served in the war; and worked on Wall Street.  Jackie knew two of his sisters from Miss Porter's School.  "I was immediately attracted to her," he readily admitted.  Mummy approved.  

        And while Jackie may not have taken John's instant ardor with great enthusiasm she soon recognized that his mere existence had put a stop to Mummy's badgering. ...

        ...Headquartered at the original Herald Building downtown, two blocks north and three blocks east of the White House, at 1307 H Street, the Washington Times-Herald newspaper occupied four stories.  The newsroom was on the ground floor, its windows facing out onto the street.  Here, as executive editor, Frank Waldrop had a large glassed-in office, which was where Jackie first came to meet with him in early October 1951.

        Initially, Waldrop recalled she "mumbled around saying something about pictures," immediately mentioning photography.  He bluntly asked, "Do you really want to go into journalism or do you want to hang around here until you get married?"

        "No, sir," Jackie replied.  "I want to make a career."

        "If you're serious, I'll be serious.  If not, you can have a job clipping things."

        "No, sir.  I'm serious."

        "I don't want you to come here in six months and say you're engaged."

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frosted flakes, books, and the new york times

 

Brian Tyler Cohen reported that, out of "fealty to Trump," Republicans recently attacked:

the NFL

the MLB

the NBA

NASCAR

Bud Light

Taylor Swift

Beyonce

Disney

the FBI

books

M&Ms

Mr. Potato Head

colleges

the Department of Education

education in general

Target

You Tube

Ben and Jerry's

Starbuck's

Coca-Cola

Delta Airlines

Chick Filet

Amazon

Walmart

Frosted Flakes

the New York Times

Nike

North Base

Pepsi

Levis...

        "just to name a few."

-------------------------------------- A Taylor Swift song that I like is "August."

- Play it from You Tube now, and enjoy! -

..."back when I was livin' for the hope of it all"...

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when you first experience the world

 

In the town where I live, we have the "road construction blues."  Streets get blocked off - people have to drive in different routes to get where they're going because the usual routes are temporarily blocked.

Last night around 12:30 (this morning, technically) I was noticing that a residential street off the main street is rather full of parked vehicles on both sides.  And just when I was thinking it was a little crowded, a gigantic semi truck (for one of the chain food-delivery businesses) turned off the main street because of the detour and bore down the residential street with ominous, exasperated determination.

        You could tell from the outside of the truck - the way it moved - that the driver was ticked off and impatient with the detours and the inconvenience they cause.

It was a little scary.

Since the street that's being improved is right outside the windows of my writing studio (front room), when roads started getting blocked off at the beginning of this summer, I thought, "Oh it's going to be noisy."

But funnily enough, the opposite is true.  It's quieter than it has ever been, because traffic is re-routed, and so that nearly constant buzz, bop, and clang of daily transportation outside has been removed.

        And as it turns out, Road Construction isn't as loud as one would imagine.

Often, now, the Quiet takes on its own identity, and oblique power.

        Like living out in the country.

------------------------------------------------ Reading Camera Girl, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony, I learned many new details about a history I already knew from other books.  Jacqueline Bouvier's life pre-Kenndy was basically this:

--  college

--  working at a newspaper as the "camera girl"

--  getting engaged to a man named John Husted

--  meeting John Fitzgerald Kennedy

--  getting disengaged from John Husted and marrying U.S. Senator Kennedy

_______________________  Her college experience included three different schools:

Vassar

the Sorbonne, in Paris, France

and George Washington University.

------------------ [excerpt from Camera Girl] ------------- Her college friends consistently recalled how she stood out for her intelligence and sophistication but rejected the responsibility of being a leader, hating being a "schoolgirl among schoolgirls."  

        Jackie complained to Vivi that she felt "suffocated" on Vassar's isolated campus, adding, "Once classwork is done, I need stimulation."  As 1950 began, Jackie had been reveling in the sophisticated urban life of Paris for four months, and had affirmed her conviction that she belonged in a city.

        During prior visits from campus to see her father in New York and now in her letters to him from Paris, she complained about Vassar, but since she had completed nearly half her college education there, he insisted she return that fall to finish it.  

        After making her appearance at the New York Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in December 1947, she had posed with several other debs for a Life magazine photo.  Although the image was not ultimately published, she had nevertheless earned her first paycheck, prompting her to suggest shortly thereafter that she quit Vassar and try to make a living as a print model.  

Black Jack objected.  When, in early 1950, she raised this idea again, from Paris, he snapped that "you don't waste a college education and a year at the Sorbonne to be a model in New York City - so forget that idea."

La Sorbonne, Paris

painting by Jean Mirre

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