Columbus, Ohio USA
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Thurber Connection
written by Gazette Publisher
Tom Thomson

Episode One

I first learned of James Thurber's death in the papers. The date was November 4, 1961. He had been stricken with a blood clot on the brain October 4 and underwent emergency surgery. The operation was successful, but he contracted pneumonia which was too much for his weakened body to resist.

Thurber was cremated and his ashes were brought home to Columbus from New York City for burial in Greenlawn Cemetery.

The ceremony was held November 9, at 3 p.m. In a brief and simple graveside service, the ashes of the world-famous humorist and humanitarian were buried in the family plot among the Fishers and Thurbers who had been immortalized in many of his stories.

His wife, Helen, was there, calm and composed after the long vigil that had begun a month before.

After his eyesight had completely failed, Thurber called her his seeing-eye wife. For many years she assisted him in copying, reading, and re-reading manuscripts and drawings, as well as being a friendly critic. His closest friends attested that his burden had for many years been lightened by Helen's affection and loyalty.

Thurber's daughter by a first marriage, Rosemary, and her husband, Frederick Sauers, of La Grange, Illinois, were present. Thurber had remained close to Rosemary and later to his grandchildren.

His two brothers were there, William and Robert, both residents of Columbus.

There were friends from the New York theatrical and literary worlds. Burgess Meredith, of stage and screen fame, and the director of The Thurber Carnival, stood out in the small crowd of mourners in his Cossack hat and greatcoat. J. G. Gude, a longtime associate and his literary agent, was present.

Friends from Ohio State University student days and his early newspaper days in Columbus included Elliot Nugent, Thurber's collaborator on The Male Animal.

Tom Meek, New York stockbroker, was present, head bared to the light snow sifting down from the slate-colored November sky.

George A. Smallsreed, Sr., retired editor of The Columbus Dispatch and a fellow reporter during Thurber's days on the paper, came to pay his last respects.

And, there were cousins of the Thurber and Fisher families who had known James Thurber when they were children.

The Reverend Karl Scheufler, pastor of First Methodist Church which the Thurber family attended, read the short prayers and a verse from the Methodist hymnal:

"Now the laborer's task is over,
Now the battle day is past,
Now upon the further shore,
Lands a voyager at last."

From a distant part of the cemetery, came the cawing of a flock of winter crows.

A few minutes later the figures, some 40 of them, bundled against the cold, had entered their cars and departed. Only a gravedigger remained. Working under the green canvas tent, he rolled back the artificial sod, fully exposing the neat square excavation, much like a plug in a watermelon.

His gloved hands carefully picked up the bronze urn - polished and radiating bands of metallic highlights from its surface - and like some gaunt pirate of old, he placed his trophy out of sight in the bottom of the hole.

Working silently, he spaded in half a wheelbarrow load of heavy gravel-mixed cement, and on top of that he placed twenty shovelfuls of top soil. Exactly twenty.

When he was through, he turned his roughened, weather-beaten face to the sky. "My Gawd, it's raw out," he said to no one in particular, and he shivered. "I wonder who this Thurber guy was?" he was probably thinking. "Lot of respectable-looking people came to see him off." He finished tamping down the earth and then got together the tools of his trade preparatory to putting them in a truck which had driven up.

A few weeks later, the grave had a marker over it. It was inscribed simply with the name James Thurber and the two dates: December 8, 1894, and November 4, 1961, which incorporated the days of his life.

There was a partial border on the stone, around the sides and top, and just right of center was inscribed "The Last Flower," a depiction of a bent and frail blossom, the sole survivor of a Thurber-imagined Armageddon.

Thurber's mother, Mary A. Thurber, was a Fisher, and it is in the Fisher plot, presided over by a four-foot monument in good taste, that Thurber is buried.

The 60-by-75 foot lot contains the bodies of William Fisher (1840-1918), and Catherine Fisher (1845-1925). James' father, Charles L. Thurber (1867-1939), and mother, Mary A. Thurber (1866-1955), rest close to each other.

Other members of the family who are joined together in eternal sleep within arms reach of each other are: Martha D. Fisher (1875-1900); Kirt B. Fisher (1880-1920); Mildred Ruth Fisher (1871-1961); Gretchen Morgan Fisher (1895-1952); Robert Dana Summerville, Jr. (1942-1947); Wilson H. Gardner (1882-1941); Ruth Fisher Morgan (1896-1955), and Vance Snyder Morgan (1897-1955).

Many prominent families of early Columbus are located within a short walking distance of the Fisher plot.

Just to the west rises a gentle slope, or ridge, which runs north and south almost the width of the 341-acre cemetery. This ridge, presenting a grand panoramic view of giant oak and hemlock trees, is the last resting place of many of the original landholders in what was originally Franklinton, and later was to become Columbus.

Here are the many members of the Sullivant family, offspring of Lucas Sullivant, large landholder and businessman, including his son, William, a botanist of considerable eminence.

Here, too, are the Starlings, Neils, Deshlers, and many others who once were leading citizens of our town.

Closer to the Fisher plot are the Schwenkers, the Gobeys, the Leslies, and the final spot where a sculpture of Emil Ambos casts a line into some eternal trout stream. The life-sized replica was created by J. F. Brines and cast in bronze at the John Williams Bronze Foundry in New York.

The figure of Ambos (who died in 1898 at the age of 53), sits on a stone, wearing an outdoorsman's hat, a canvas coat, and a dress shirt with a stiff collar and bow tie. He has a watch guard and the vest is partly unbuttoned. The fly rod is unjoined. At one time, he held two small-mouthed bass on a stringer. A thief robbed him of his catch a few years back.

Within a stone's throw of Thurber's grave is "the pit." This delightful spot is a favorite haunt of birds and birders alike. A day seldom passes in any season or weather that more than one of these perceptive and sensitive people are somewhere close by. On spring mornings, cars are lined all around the pit as dozens of birding enthusiasts pursue their prey.

The Fisher plot contains two trees. One is a catalpa, the other a tulip tree. In the spring, the tulip tree, especially, is frequently full of bright-plumaged birds quietly moving about in the tender young leaves in the crown of the tree.

The funeral ceremony

After hard migration flights these birds drop down into the luxurious green wonderland of trees that Green Lawn represents from the air. In the tulip tree I have seen a multitude of brightly colored birds. Occasionally they break into a bit of song, then a sweet caroling fills the air.

They say that James Thurber not only lived in the two vastly dissimilar worlds of New York City and Columbus, but that many of his literary works could be rather equally divided between these two different ways of life.

Columbus represented the large family of relatives, friends, and neighbors along the genteel tree-lined streets of the city's old east side. Not only that, his stories and anecdotes about these people were actually a time-capsule of sorts, a delving back to the first quarter of the century by a sensitive mind – which was also blessed with an exquisite sense of humor.

Episode Two

Under a tulip tree lies the grave of James Thurber. In a bronze urn set in concrete his ashes repose in the beautiful park-like Greenlawn Cemetery.

He was born December 8, 1894, in Columbus; he died November 4, 1961 in New York City.

His family lived in a house on Parsons Avenue, in what was Columbus' fashionable east side at the time. James' birth followed that of his brother William by little more than a year.

James was delivered by Margery Albright, a practical nurse, known as Aunt Margery to many families who utilized her services.

In his biography of Thurber, Burton Bernstein relates that "not only did Margery deliver the infant without the aid of Dr. Dunham who arrived at Parsons Avenue too late: 'You might have spared your horse,' she told the doctor, We managed all right without you.'"

In later years, in an autobiographical vignette, Thurber wrote:

". . . James Thurber was born on a night of wild portent and high wind in the year 1894, at 147 Parsons Avenue, Columbus, Ohio. The house, which is still standing bears no tablet or plaque of any description, and is never pointed out to visitors. Once Thurber's mother, walking past the place with an old lady from Fostoria, Ohio, said to her, 'My son James was born in that house,' to which the old lady, who was extremely deaf, replied, 'Why on the Tuesday morning train, unless my sister is worse.'"

Actually, Thurber had the address wrong. The correct address apparently was 251 Parsons Avenue.

A third son, Robert, was born in 1896, and that completed the Thurber family.

The mother, the former Mary Agnes Fisher, was from a family of highly successful merchants who owned a flourishing commission house in Columbus.

The father, Charles Thurber, eked out a living in poorly paid clerking jobs, at various times secretary to the Chairman of the Republican State Committee, and later a Correspondence Clerk in the Governor's Office.

In 1898, the house on Parsons Avenue was sold and the family bought a 3-story brick house at 921 Champion Avenue, which at that time was on the edge of town. All of this through the largess of Mary's father.

This was to prove the most carefree and joyous period of the young boy's life. He and his brothers went to Ohio Avenue Elementary School.

Thurber remembered accompanying his father to a voting booth in 1900, where the faithful Republican cast a vote for William McKinley.

He later recounted in "The Secret Life of James Thurber," in The Thurber Carnival that ". . . It was a drab and somewhat battered tin shed set on wheels, and it was filled with guffawing men and cigar smoke . . .

"A fat jolly man dandled me on his knee and said that I would soon be old enough to vote against William Jennings Bryan.

"I thought he meant that I could push a folded piece of paper into the slot of the padlocked box as soon as my father was finished.

"When this turned out not to be true, I had to be carried out of the place kicking and screaming. In my struggles I knocked my father's derby off several times.

" . . . It remains obstinately in my memory as a rather funny hat, a little too large in the crown, which gave my father the appearance of a tired, sensitive gentleman who had been persuaded against his will to take part in a game of charades . . ."

When the then Republican governor Bushnell was defeated in the 1900 elections, Papa Thurber was again without a job. But he did land a job in Washington D.C., so the family pulled up stakes and moved to Falls Church, Virginia.

In a game of William Tell, James was blinded in his left eye when his older brother William shot him with an arrow. Instead of taking him right away to a specialist who could probably have saved his eye, his parents took him to an inept local practitioner.

To make matters worse, Mary had been dabbling in the Christian Science religion and nothing further was done, even though the injured eye should have been removed after a few weeks. In those days before cortisone treatment, this led to a condition called sympathetic ophthalmia, which led to chronic inflammation and diminished eyesight in the remaining eye.

In 1903, Charles Thurber's job had evaporated and the family retreated back to Columbus where James attended Sullivant School.

Political jobs were scarce but eventually Charles acquired a position as a recording clerk in the Ohio Senate. He and his family lived in a large boarding house called the Park Hotel and it was there, in 1904, that Charles fell desperately ill with "brain fever," but what was probably a bad case of influenza.

The family moved into Grandfather Fisher's mansion on Bryden Road. Things became pretty hectic there, what with a sick man and three rambunctious young boys.

The result: James was more or less farmed out to Aunt Margery, sometimes overnight, sometimes for days on end. If he was somewhat hurt at first by this exclusion, he grew to relish it.

Even though it was a poor household, he truly liked Aunt Margaret and he got along all right with her daughter, Belle. Not only that, Jim West's livery stable was right next door.

During these years, various of his school teachers considered him as extremely nervous, easily distracted, and prone to blush. His grades were unexceptional but always passing.

An interest in drawing developed when he was seven and by the time he was in the fourth grade at Sullivant School his teacher, Miss Ballinger, complimented him on his art work.

In 1907, about the time James was finishing the sixth grade at Sullivant, his father lost his job in the Ohio Senate (and was to remain unemployed for two years), and a serious rift developed between the Thurber and Fisher families.

Charles and his brood left the Fisher mansion and moved into a run-down house on South Seventeenth Street.

Some people said that Grandfather Fisher "disowned the lot of them."

According to Ralph McCombs, a longtime friend of James, "The rich Fishers didn't want the poor side of the family around." Little wonder that later in life James would title one of his books My Life and Hard Times.

So the young James Thurber continued to grow, coping with the setbacks and not-always-happy-times of an insecure, if not dysfunctional, family life. Along the way, absorbing the fables and foibles of kinfolk and acquaintances right here in Columbus Town.

Episode Three

The Columbus of James Thurber's childhood was a land of shade trees lining quiet residential streets. Born in 1894, his life was to span one social and industrial transition after another.

During the pre-World War I days of his early boyhood most vehicles in Columbus were horsedrawn, but the transition to internal combustion engines was rapid after the war. (Milk wagons remained horsedrawn in Columbus until the middle thirties.)

Soon, rickety-rackety streetcars painted bright orange and yellow, rocked and rolled along the main thoroughfares; heavier and bigger traction cars, sometimes called interurbans, often with three or four cars coupled together and sharing the same trolley tracks, rumbled through town before picking up speed in the open countryside.

Massive stone and brick school buildings were the domain of strict teachers and principals not afraid to adhere to the biblical admonition of sparing the rod and spoiling the child.

There was a profusion of drug stores, confectioneries, and candy stores boasting of such a wonderful variety of mouth-watering treats that the pennies would literally fly out of a boy's corduroy knicker pockets.

There were licorice whips, both black and red, malted milk balls, green leaves, bull's eyes, coconut flags, jaw breakers, tootsie rolls, long strips of paper with little candy dots stuck on them. Kids with a yen for gambling could buy a little chocolate-covered cream for a penny, and if it had a pink center they won a whole box of chewy cara-mels.

Ice trucks, especially in summer, were a great attraction. The sturdy men with tongs who shouldered the heavy blocks of ice didn't care too much if the neighborhood boys lifted the tarpaulin to steal a few chips.

About the middle of June, fireworks stands and tents appeared around the edges of town with their rows upon rows of colorful explosives. It took a steady stream of nickels, dimes and quarters earned on paper routes and delivering Collier's, or Liberty, or The Saturday Evening Post to stockpile an adequate supply of Fourth of July fun and excitement.

Many of the fireworks were from China. They were wrapped in red wax paper and tissue paper with colorful labels and contained everything from strings of lady fingers and firecrackers, sometimes called Yankee Salutes, all the way up to big-time aerial bombs and giant cannon crackers.

There was a wonderful smell about all of these products, a smell of gunpowder and chemicals mixed liberally with the heady smell of burning punk. All of these sights and sounds and institutions contributed to the shaping of the young Thurber.

There was the devastating 1913 flood which caused great damage and considerable loss of life in Columbus and Dayton; yet, ironically enough, that flood will undoubtedly be remembered mostly because of the hilarious story that Thurber later wrote called, "The Day the Dam Broke."

These were pre-prohibition times, and you can be sure there were plenty of saloons in Columbus. Down along Front Street, toward Main Street, there flourished a lively trade in the procurement of feminine charms, and there's no question young Thurber had heard tales about all these ways of life.

Electric runabouts were a sign of gentility (and wealth) and were frequently seen purring along elm-lined East Broad Street, Franklin Avenue and Bryden Road - all Thurber Country.

Set in such surroundings, many of the people familiar to the boy were later to gain a degree of immortality in his stories. Indeed, many of his most humorous tales dealt with the happenings and exploits of members of his own family.

There was Stacy Taylor, the stepfather of Thurber's maternal grandmother. Taylor was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word, self-educated, energetic (he made and lost several fortunes during his long life) and resourceful.

Mary Van York was a cousin of Thurber's great-grandmother who lived to be ninety-three in spite of having smoked an estimated 200,000 pipefuls of Star Plug tobacco.

Thurber's maternal grandfather was William Fisher, founder of a fruit and produce store. Married at the outbreak of the Civil War, William Fisher died at the age of 78 in the year World War I ended. His widow survived him and lived to be 80. When she died in 1925, Thurber declared,"It marked the close of a way of family life in the Middle West."

As we have already mentioned, a long-time friend of the Fishers and Thurbers was Aunt Margery Albright, "an elderly lady who had dizzy spells from lack of sleep, or overwork, but never from the vapors." He wrote that her generation was "a time of stout-hearted and self-reliant women."

In 1903, Thurber attended Sullivant School. In succeeding years he went to Douglas Junior High School and East High School. In 1913, he entered The Ohio State University.

He was introvertive to an extreme. Elliot Nugent recalls that Thurber used to wander forlornly around campus on cold winter days, "dressed in an old pair of pants, an old coat, no vest, no overcoat and no hat."

During his first three years at the university he was a loner. He dropped out of school for one year without telling his parents, spending his days reading at the university library.

In 1916, Thurber met Elliot Nugent on the campus and under his prodding and tutelage became more active in student affairs. In 1918 he became editor-in-chief of the Sun Dial, campus humor magazine, and he became a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity when Nugent threatened to quit if the fraternity didn't accept him.

During the latter part of Thurber's days at Ohio State the college first became recognized as a football power, in considerable measure due to the gridiron prowess of Chic Harley.

Before the construction of the present horseshoe stadium, football was played at Ohio Field, on North High Street near 18th Avenue.

One end of the field was situated where Ramseyer Hall now stands. Beyond the opposite end was the medieval structure of the old Armory. Along the west side of the field there was a woods.

It was here that spectators (mostly faculty, male students, neighborhood boys and sporting men from downtown) lined the field, many of them standing, a few more comfortably settled in carriages and run-abouts.

The first year that Harley played was 1916 (the same year young Thurber met Nugent). Ohio State won all their football games that year, in the process routing Oberlin 128 to 0.

In 1917 Ohio State not only won every game, but racked up an incredible 292 points to their opponents' 6 (Indiana 26 to 3 and Wisconsin 16 to 3).

Here's what one-time Columbus Dispatch columnist Johnny Jones said about Chic: "Today I see halfbacks on both competing teams face situations where Harley would have been away for a touchdown.

"Oh that a movie of Chic Harley could be shown to the stars of today. None of him exist. Oh, that some renowned radio announcer had to tell of a play when Harley actually used Referee Frank Birch for interference to gain some 20 yards. To see him outplay the mighty Paddy Driscoll."

Chic Harley ("The Only One") was a lifelong hero of Thurber's and is frequently mentioned in his reminiscences.

Thurber liked most sports and had a genuine affection for football, which he thought "has more beauty in it than any other competitive game in the world, when played by college athletes."

On the other hand, he decried the emphasis placed on big-time collegiate football to the detriment and lack of interest, he thought, of the arts.

He wrote that, while he liked football, "we refuse to join that rapidly swelling throng which is making football not an institution but the institution . . . almost every lover of literature that we know among university students or alumni also loves football.

"As much cannot be said of the other side. The enmity started by the virile American parent, is kept up only by the bull-headed idiocy of the fellow who is never anything but a football player. And the public is siding in with that type. The public would vote today to keep football and kill off every-thing else in the university, if a choice had to be made.

"It is as much as your reputation is worth to be caught carrying a concealed Shelley at this virile school," he concluded.

Episode Four

In the short piece, "University Days," James Thurber describes a few of the hazards that befell him on the great Scarlet and Gray campus.

Thurber, you will recall, was accidentally blinded in one eye when he was a boy and the other eye was permanently weakened. He writes of the anguish he suffered while taking physical education, which was compulsory in order to graduate.

"They wouldn't let you play or join in the exercises with your glasses on and I couldn't see with mine off."

As might be expected, he didn't get along too well under these hapless circumstances.

Military instruction under the ROTC program was no more successful. However, by failing his military drill class each year, and repeating it each succeeding year, through practice alone, he became proficient.

General Littlefield, commandant of the drill corps, had one day snapped at him, "You are the main trouble with this university!"

Thurber was never sure whether the General meant his "type" was the main trouble with the university, or whether he meant him individually. He finally came to the conclusion that he didn't know. "I don't think about it much anymore," he wrote.

In . . . botany class he had his instructor a-quiver, "like Lionel Barrymore," because of his inability to see plant cells through a microscope.

When he finally saw an image and had drawn it on paper, the teacher looked at the drawing, "his eyebrows high in hope."

"What's that?" he demanded with a hint of a squeal in his voice. The instructor then bent over to look through the microscope for himself. "His head snapped up.

"That's your eye!" he shouted. "You've fixed the lens so that it reflects! You've drawn your eye!"

One other thing in regard to Thurber and athletics. Though his failing eyesight kept him from most childhood sports, and consequently helped make him introspective, as an adult, and before total blindness finally closed in on him, he became a proficient bowler, horseshoe pitcher, Ping-Pong player and tennis player. He liked to listen to ball games and wrote a number of pieces about baseball.

But, as he wrote for the Columbus Dispatch in a Sunday half-page titled Credos and Curios, "Millions," say Ohio State students, alumni and downtown football fans . . . "but not one cent for literature."'

This was in 1923 and was in protest of Ohio State's poor support of a literary magazine. For half a century or more after that, The Ohio State University had no quarterly or other critical magazine worthy of that name. Today - happily -there is The Journal, a bi-annually published literary magazine emanating from the English Department.

Thurber ended his university days in the spring of 1918 (without receiving a degree) to become a code clerk for the State Department, first in Washington, D.C., and then at the American Embassy in Paris, from November, 1918 to March, 1920.

It is almost certain that Thurber inherited much of his "gift of gab" and sense of humor from his mother, Mary. For many years prior to her death she lived at the Southern Hotel at the corner of Main and High Streets. Jim was sure to visit her at least once or twice a year.

Johnny Jones, long-time columnist for the Columbus Dispatch, tells the story of how James and his mother with several friends had walked down High Street to Mills Cafeteria for Sunday dinner. Once inside the revolving door, they found the place so crowded there wasn't a single table empty.

After standing in line a while, Mrs. Thurber gave a little sigh and collapsed onto the white tile floor. All those with her bent over to administer what comfort they could and a number of people from the closest tables sprang to their feet to give assistance.

Presently, Mary opened one eye, whereupon Jim asked her how she felt. Immediately she replied, "Don't just stand there, grab that table!"

They say that James Thurber not only lived in the two vastly dissimilar worlds - New York City and Columbus - but that many of his works could be rather equally divided between these two different ways of life.

Columbus represented the large family of relatives, friends and neighbors along the elm- and maple-lined streets of Columbus' east side. His stories and articles about these people were actually a time capsule of sorts, a delving back to the first quarter of the century by a sensitive mind which was also blessed with an exquisite sense of humor.

This hometown of his boyhood is the setting for many of Thurber's most famous stories. The people who filled these episodes might find themselves in difficult circumstances, sometimes approaching the absurd, but the trouble, whatever it was, was always manageable.

Robert F. Morseberger says in his excellent study of Thurber's life (published by the College and University Press, New Haven, Conn): "His backward glances should not be casually dismissed as mere escapism."

He cites just a few of the seemingly insurmountable problems with which we are faced today as a nation and goes on to say, "Columbus thus becomes an answer to the neurotic personality of our time that is rapidly becoming psychopathic."

All of this might be as true today as it was back then. In "The Thurber Album," for instance, Thurber takes us back to what he himself called, "the good old days. Those were indeed the days . . . . all the graceful things I remember are gone, like presenting your calling card to the maid. Most people long for these things deep down."

New York represented something entirely different. His vignettes, stories, and cartoons depict an entirely different world.

Here we find the stresses and strains of modern living. Marital and drinking problems plague his characters, although it must be said most of them stick it out, living lives of quiet desperation. These later stories are smoothly sophisticated, clearly crafted by a master, and although the faces and the years are changed there is one similarity that relates them to the stories about his youth. Very simply put, it is holding a mirror up to many of the inconsequential and not so ha-ha funny traits of people and making them appear extremely ha-ha funny.

Through experience, the sensitive, critical humorist's mind early discovered that for all his conquest and for all his technological achievements man was an insecure, sexually maladjusted, irrational, and frequently cruel creature.

To properly prick the over-blown and bombastic image of man, Thurber found that nature in the abstract provided the perfect foil. For if man was a part of nature, then many of his attributes as well as failures could be found in the non-human world all about him.

In spite of the popular attitude toward nature of complete reverence or, for that matter, any of the other attitudes, including utter impartiality and indifference, or honest hostility, it must he admitted that nature is like man - good one minute, horrible the next.

Unimpressed by man's pretensions, Thurber wrote: "Abstract reasoning, in itself, has not benefited Man so much as instinct has benefited the lower animals. In moving into the alien and complicated sphere of Thought and Imagination he has become the least well-adjusted of all the creatures on the earth and, hence, the most bewildered."

Again he wrote: "It may be the finer mysteries of life and death can he comprehended only through pure instinct; the cat, for example, appears to know . . Man, on the other hand, is surely further away from the Answer than any other animal this side of the ladybug. His mistaken selection of reasoning as an instrument of perception has put him into a fine quandary."

Thurber observed in 1939 that man lacks even the sense to preserve his species; that, while the lower social animals cooperate constructively, man often does so for destruction.

In 1961 he remarked that the dolphin may in some respects have superior mental power and that, at any rate, they were creatures of "gaiety, charm and in-telligence."

In 1958, he told Henry Brandon, "I often think it would be fine if the French Poodles would take over the world because they've certainly been more intelligent in the last few years than the human being . . . My old poodle, who died at 17, had genuine comic sense . . But, as I say, when I spoke to the poodle about her species taking over, she said: 'The hell with it!' They don't want to get mixed up in it."

Episode Five

 

AUGUST 2006 Episode One Hundred

During my frequent trips to Green Lawn Cemetery to visit the gravesites of my mother and brother, or to go birding, I often stop by the last resting places of the Thurber clan.

Playfully, I talk to them. I do this a lot at Green Lawn – if no one is looking, that is. Strangers, I mean. When I’m with friends, I don’t care. They already know I’m crazy.

I say hello to my mother and brother, briefly because we were never an overly talkative family.

And there are a few other departed souls with whom I exchange pleasantries. Pretty one-sided conversations, huh?

Sometimes I’ll say hello to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker because he was such a hero. There aren’t many more. So you see, I’m very selective, considering the tens of thousands resting there.

Once in a while, I’ll wander over to Dr. Snook’s unmarked gravesite to make sure he’s behaving.

Or sometimes I’ll say hello to Olive Ann Gump who resides all alone in her beautiful sepulcher by the picturesque old bridge over the ravine. I like to think that I’m cheering her up.

That’s about it. But if you ever get a chance, visit Green Lawn Cemetery. It’s a beautiful place, and there’s a lot of history out there.

So, anyway, when I’m walking near James Thurber’s grave, I’ll say kiddingly, “Hi James, why don’t we go somewhere and have a drink?”

His grave marker is adorned with an etching of “The Last Flower” from a series of his drawings depicting the war-like nature of mankind.

Mame, his mother, has a grave marker just with her name and the years her life spanned: 1866 to 1955.

When I’m nearby and say something like “Hi ya kiddo, that was some wheelchair ride you took that time,” I can almost hear her giggle.
So, in this way, I like to think that she lives on. Maybe you could call it a form of immortality. Keeping memories of this person alive. Oh, by the way, her brothers, Robert and William, are buried nearby.

Now let’s travel back through time again, back to the old Southern Hotel where we left James Thurber’s mother, Mame.

She moved into the Southern in 1941 and remained there until her final year, 1955. She resided in Room 510.

Mame’s two brothers were also residents of the hotel during many of those years. Still standing at 310 S. High St., it’s now the Westin Great Southern Columbus.

Although the management probably frowned on it, some of the guests had their own little hot plates with which they could do a limited amount of cooking in the privacy of their own rooms.

Plus, in those halcyon days, the hotel was like an oasis smack dab in the middle of a busy downtown area – and I mean really busy. A lot busier than nowadays.

It’s worth telling you about, so we’re going to leave Mame again for now. Don’t worry about her. She’ll be back.

JULY 2006 Episode Ninety-Nine

We were talking about Mame, James Thurber’s mother – when she was a young girl, a teenager.

We were trying to imagine what it might have been like when she pulled off her great wheelchair caper.

Now, we’re going to fast-forward, but first let’s look at a few vital statistics.

Mame was born in 1866 and died at the ripe old age of 89 in 1955. James died just six years later in 1961. All that high living must have caught up with him! Cigarettes, whiskey, and late hours.

He and his brothers, along with their mother, are buried in the Fisher family plot at Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus. The grave site is located at the southwest corner of the pond near the sculpture of Emile Ambos, the fisherman.

Fishing in some eternal stream.

Now, hang on as we go zipping through time. Swooosh!

Suddenly it’s 1950. World War II is long over. North Korea and Vietnam loom on the horizon.
The man with no middle name is in the Oval Office. The economy is booming. Our cast of characters are alive and kicking.

James is living alone in midtown Manhattan and is probably at the zenith of his creative career. He is a star! One new book follows another. Once or twice a year he takes time away from his busy schedule to come out here to Columbus to see his mother.

Althea his wife is in Connecticut with her show dogs. Her marriage to James is obviously on the rocks.

Mame is in the sunset years of her life and has moved into the stately old Southern Hotel. She is 84 years old.

Like many hotels in those days, the Southern catered to permanent residents in addition to transients. There weren’t as many apartments back then as now, and there certainly weren’t a lot of retirement centers.

Thus it was that my maternal grandmother (my “Orbiting Grandmother” of many Legendary Tales) decided to roost at the Southern.

The two ladies, although of vastly different backgrounds, and temperaments, became friends. Maybe acquaintances would be a more accurate word.

My grandmother was a staid and no-nonsense kind of individual. A study in lavender and old lace. Mame, on the other hand, was as bright-eyed and chattery as a squirrel in a nut shop.

Another word or two about Southern Hotel living might be appropriate here: They enjoyed a comfortable room, adjoining bathroom, maid service. Not only all that, there was also a fine dining room and cocktail lounge right off the lobby. Not a bad life!

JUNE 2006 Episode Ninety-Eight

We were talking about Mame, James Thurber’s mother, and we got diverted by all the wonders of the old Central Market District.

We might as well continue on that track because there’s a lot more to tell – so we might as well get it over with.

The market and all its trappings was located between Third and Fifth streets and between State and Mound streets.

Traction cars, better known as interurbans, rocked and rolled through city streets headed for their terminal near the market house.

Even though they used the streetcar tracks, they looked more like train cars: a little bigger, a little heavier – the colors a bit more like train cars.
Interurban provided Columbus commuters with service to Newark, Springfield, Worthington, Delaware, Marion, and other nearby communities.

During the warm months the interurban companies frequently featured excursions to amusement parks like Buckeye Lake and Olentangy Park in Clintonville.

Within a few blocks of the market there were half a dozen hotels, an art museum, Grant Hospital, the city’s main library, downtown with all its attractions, and a lot more.

I will tell you more about that next month. But now, it’s time to retell the story about the day Mame and her brothers were wandering through the market district – enjoying the sights and sounds and aromas. They were young teenagers. It was a Saturday and they had a day off from school.

In front of a storefront church they hesitated. What had once been a large storeroom or warehouse had been converted and was now a holy place – a tabernacle – if you please.

The time of service must have been near because people were streaming through the doors into the spacious interior.
And wouldn’t you know it? Like chips caught in an eddy, the three children were swept inside.

Hundreds of folding chairs were filling up fast with starry-eyed believers, the hopeful, and the hopeless.

As the faithful continued to gather, the three teenagers wandered around the back of the old hall as if they owned the place.
It was about then that Mame saw a man being lifted out of his wheelchair and helped into the men’s restroom.

Without saying a word to her brothers, Mame darted over to the wheelchair, hopped in, spun it around and headed for the main aisle.

Then she aimed her vehicle for the makeshift altar at the front of the hall, summoned all her strength, and shoved off.

Once there, before the eyes of the astonished congregation, she jumped out of the wheelchair, raised both her hands and cried out “I can walk!”

MAY 2006 Episode Ninety-Seven

I haven’t spoken much lately of Mame, Thurber’s mother.

She was a great little lady, so we will take care of that right now.Born Mary Fisher, she was the daughter of a prominent Columbus family who were in the produce business – you know, fruits, nuts, grains, and vegetables. Those kinds of good things. Wholesale. Selling their goods all over Central Ohio.

Big time.

And, as you might expect, Mame and her brothers led the good life.

The family lived in some of the loveliest homes in what is now Olde Towne East.

And you can bet your bottom dollar there was a lot of healthy food on their dinner table.Well, we can hope so.

Of course, you never can tell. Old man Fisher might have had a trade deal with one of the butcher shops over in the Central Market.

Fresh produce for rashers of bacon, T-bone steaks, spareribs, and all that good stuff. After all, back then, no one had heard of cholesterol.

How Mame met and married Charles W. Thurber is a story we have already told you about in an earlier episode of this chronicle.

However, there is one other incident we have already shared with you that is well worth repeating.

But first, to do the story justice, I’m going to fill you in with some background material.

For many years the Central Market District was one of Columbus’s major attractions. In addition to the merchants who had their stalls in the handsome market house, on market days many other venders had their stands along surrounding streets.

Not only that, there were all kinds of retail stores lining the avenues for blocks around.

Most of them were family enterprises offering a wide variety of goods and services. There were bakeries, delicatessens, restaurants and bars cheek-to-jowl with ice cream parlors, apparel shops and shoe stores.

One shoe store – Gilbert’s, with its bright orange exterior – was located on Town Street for many years.

The nearby bus station (still there) was another magnet pulling people into the busy area.

Okay! Okay! Okay!

I know!

You want to hear about Mame!

Well, you’ll have to come back next month!

APRIL 2006 Episode Ninety-Six

1934 was the best of years for James Thurber. A best-selling book under his belt – and more coming on. Something new, something old, something imagined. A wacky world of words; households full of befuddled and distraught human beings; a Noah’s arkload of never to be forgotten, innocent-looking animals.

At last he had found a style that suited him – and evidently suited the vast majority of the reading public, although not all. There were dissenters. And they could be vocal.

I recall (years later) being in the Press Club of Ohio in downtown Columbus one evening. At that time, the club was located in Lynn Alley behind the old Ohio State Journal building whose main entrance was on East Broad Street.

The Press Club moved around a lot, but this was one of its best locations. It occupied three floors in the newly renovated building.

The game room (pool and ping-pong) was in the basement. A fully-equipped kitchen and pleasantly appointed dining room was on the second floor. The reception area on the first floor included the manager’s office, a cocktail lounge with a piano bar and a stag bar in the rear.

One time I encountered Roger Maris, the baseball great, recognized him, and obtained his autograph. Still have it.

Anyway, it was cocktail hour, and I was looking forward to maybe running into a few old friends – guys like Ben Hayes, George Embry, Cliff Sapp, Bill Hoover, Cal Kalwary.

Press Club membership, by the way, consisted of business people and journalists.

When I walked up to the piano bar, I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard this long-time columnist for one of the local papers debunking Thurber as a writer. All of this in a loud, pontifical voice while waving his pipe around. One or two of the fellows present agreed with him.

Professional jealousy? Maybe.

Three or four others disagreed or kept their opinions to themselves.

Remember, Thurber had worked at the Columbus Dispatch. Yet, most of the guys were way too young to have known Thurber – to have been a contemporary of his.

But, wait a minute! What made the situation so hysterically funny was that it was pretty common knowledge among the local newspaper folk that the loud-mouth who started the whole thing was a rewrite man’s nightmare!

In other words, all the copy he turned in to his editors had to be extensively rewritten. For spelling. For grammar. For accuracy.

I didn’t enter into the discussion, but I was laughing on the inside.

And, let me say again, by this time Thurber had written the vast majority of his stories.

“So, not to worry, James Thurber, not to worry.”

MARCH 2006 Episode Ninety-Five

Interestingly enough, the difference between memoirs and fiction has been a hot news item lately. Where would this controversy position Thurber? Probably out on a limb.

Far out!

Like many talented writers of his day, his creations are not the easiest things in the world to categorize. But isn’t this true of literary genius wherever we find it? The literary greats of all nationalities. How about the great classical Russian writers? Is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina a memoir or fiction? War and Peace sounds mighty like a memoir to me – although a long one, I’ll admit.

What about Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov – truth or fiction? Let’s get real controversial. Was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita a figment of his imagination or was it based on actual experience? We can’t leave the Irish out! How about Joyce’s Ulysses? Okay, I can hear some of you complaining that I’m comparing apples and oranges.

So, let’s compare Thurber to a few other famous humorists. Here’s one for you. Were Mark Twain’s memorable books about life on the Mississippi fact or fiction? Nancy Grace, pay attention! Larry King, take note! Oprah, where are you? Are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn Gospel truth or the meanderings of a fanciful dreamer? How about the works of Oscar Wilde?

Have you ever read The Catcher in the Rye? Sounds suspiciously like a collection of memoirs to me. All of those crazy adventures of Holden Caulfield. And all of that intense and convoluted introspection that runs through the book like a river. How about the movie One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest? That classic film harpooned mental hospitals, the medical profession, the whole shebang.

So, what’s the big controversy all about? In the case of sensitive subjects, the reputation of the publisher should be an important consideration. Authoritative testimonials on the dust jacket are helpful to the would-be reader, and an introduction and foreword can be even more useful. Finally, there are the reviews in the media which can cast a variety of opinions on the subject. The whole idea – at least in a free society – is to maintain a forum for the free exchange of ideas, anything less than that would amount to a dictatorship.

How does all this apply to James Thurber? Well, the truth is that he was well aware of many of these precepts. More than that, he was a champion of freedom. He tilted with at least one major university over the issue of freedom of speech. Of course, that was back in the McCarthy era. First of all, there is no denying that many of Thurber’s stories are based on fact. Take “The Day the Dam Broke.” This story is based on a deadly flood that ravaged parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio. It was part of the same weather system that caused the famous Johnstown flood. People in Columbus had been reading and hearing about it. And, it was raining cats and dogs here in Central Ohio. People were real nervous. Jittery. Then the day in question, the rumor started.

“The dam has broken!”

Men, women, children, cats, and dogs ran for their lives! Out East Broad Street! Racing for high ground!

All Thurber did was put his spin on it.

FEBRUARY 2006 Episode Ninety-Four

Whew! Seems like I’ve been working on these Thurber columns forever! Well, 94 episodes (or chapters) has taken a bit of doing. So, let’s take time out for a handful of biographical notes, which hopefully might add some perspective to the entire series.

It seems like I’ve been crisscrossing Thurber’s tracks for a good part of my life. How could it be otherwise? For awhile, when I was in the second and third grade, I went to Douglas Elementary, the same school he attended – long since torn down. The old brick building could be recognized from afar by the huge cylindrical fire escape attached to one of its exterior walls. For another short period of my life, I lived on Lexington Avenue – the heart of Thurber country, near the present-day Thurber House. For most of my teens, my family – my mother, my brother, and sometimes my orbiting grandmother – lived near the university. In rented houses, taking student roomers, moving frequently, living a nomadic life during the Great Depression. At one time, we lived on Neil Avenue not more than half a block from the apartment building at King and Neil where Thurber and his wife Althea lived briefly.

When we were moving around at such a frantic pace it became difficult for our grandmother to keep up with us. At such times she would stay at the Southern Hotel which catered to residents. And, guess who else lived there for quite a few years? Mame, Thurber’s mother. My grandmother knew her, and I believe I might have seen her walking around the lobby when I was visiting my grandmother. Back then they had a great many permanent residents, mostly older folks. All the amenities of a retirement center: a dining room, maid service, and all the rest.

During the ‘30s and ‘40s, Thurber frequently visited Columbus to spend some time with his mother, Mame. When she was living at the Southern Hotel, they would sometimes walk up High Street to Mill’s Cafeteria, which was one of Mame’s favorite dining spots.

And, of course, we shared the wide expanses of the Ohio State University campus, the sprawling Oval and its many buildings, not to speak of fraternity row and all the wonderful hangouts along High Street. Places like Hennick’s and the many friendly bars and taverns. All of this shared somehow with Thurber – separated by a handful of years, a brief generation gap – both as a kid and later when I returned from the service, married and finished my own education, crossing and recrossing his footsteps as I walked across the oval.

Then, there were a couple of times when I briefly rubbed shoulders with the great man. One occasion was in the ballroom of the old Neil House Hotel where the Press Club of Ohio presented him with an award. The other time was at the beautiful old Hartman Theatre which was located near the corner of State and Third Streets and was long ago torn down. He was in town for a hometown presentation of “A Thurber Carnival.”

One of my favorite bistros a few years back was the Dell Restaurant on Parsons Avenue. It was in the heart of Thurber territory, a neighborhood now called Olde Towne East. Thurber would have loved it, and he might well have been familiar with it in the early years.

Actually, I started working on some of these pieces right after James Thurber passed away in November of 1961.

His ashes were interred at Green Lawn Cemetery, one of my favorite places to go birding. Recently, I suggested to the management that the nearby pond, which is referred to as “the Pit,” be called Thurber Pond. The proposed name change is being considered, and we will let you know if it becomes an actuality.

JANUARY 2006 Episode Ninety-Three

Maybe it might be beneficial to step back for a moment and take another look at what our boy from Columbus is accomplishing in New York City.

It is 1933. We know a lot about his private life at that time – his carousing around, his womanizing – we’ll grant him all of that.
Though not divorced he might as well have been. His wife Althea had snuggled herself away into an exclusive Connecticut resort village with her show dogs to keep her company. No wonder Thurber was driven to excessive drinking. It’s not every day that a man has to face the fact that his wife chooses her dogs over him. Talk about being in the dog house!

So, what’s a guy going to do?

Have a few extra drinks, I guess is what occurred to him. And, to be fair about all this, we should examine the situation from Althea’s standpoint.

There’s no doubt that her husband was a difficult man to live with. A daffy bunk mare if ever there was one. Hung over half the time. Moody, puzzled, of course. Puzzled by women, puzzled by life, puzzled by Harold Ross, his boss at The New Yorker, puzzled by his family in Columbus.

And, again, puzzled by women.

His mind was divided into a multitude of images, like a prism, reflecting on a thousand possibilities and alternatives in life – past, present, and future. Call it the creative genius at work.

Then there was his poor vision.

Imagine what Althea must have gone through just on that one count.

Here’s a guy who goes around wearing mismatched socks half the time. Imagine what a slob he must have been in the bathroom. Especially around the wash basin. You know how women are about those things.

Pools of water all over the vanity top. The bar of soap on the floor. Towels askew.

Schreeek! Brrroooom! Those were the sounds of her patience wearing thin and her temper going through the roof.

Another Waterloo for the male gender.

I don’t mean to be making fun of him because of his poor eyesight. My eyes aren’t all that good here lately either. I’m just pointing out that living together is a two-way street, which means there’s always the possibility of a head-on collision.

Make that “probability.”

And, as most men are aware (even those with 20/20 vision), women can be fussy about the cleanliness of bathrooms. And, I’m not talking about public lavatories either.

Enough of this trashy talk and let’s get to the point of all this speculation. What I’m driving at is this: They were both undoubtedly better off living alone.

When he was ensconced in Manhattan and she in Connecticut, they were protected from each other.

The clincher was that when they were apart, the peace and quiet enabled Thurber to think back to his days in Columbus with an unemcumbered mind.

That’s the payoff.

And we, the reading public, reaped the rewards.

Now, let’s take another look at My Life and Hard Times. It is a slender little volume, a mere 115 pages. In addition to an introduction by John K. Hutchens, it contains a preface by the author, nine stories, and “A Note at the End,” also by the author.

The stories are Thurber at his best and set a high standard that he seldom exceeded. They are accompanied by seventeen drawings, plus a few decorative illustrations. But best of all, we are introduced to a cast of daffy characters – in good ol’ Columbus town – who are trying to cope with circumstances beyond their control or comprehension.

Not too unlike today, I guess.

(DECEMBER 2005) Episode Ninety-Two

For all his nighttime gallivanting around with glamorous people, during the daylight hours, on the job, James Thuber was turning out a lot of high-quality work.

And, guess what?

Many of the pieces he was writing were based on fanciful memories of his boyhood in good ol’ Columbus, Ohio.

And, a good many of them were popping up in the pages of The New Yorker.

Many among his circle of friends in New York, including his future wife, Helen Wismer, were wildly enthusiastic about these accounts of his boyhood.

He submitted some of them to a publisher, Harper & Row, and BINGO! They accepted it!

A slender volume of only 115 pages, it was titled My Life and Hard Times and appeared on bookstore shelves in November, 1933.

The blurb on the back cover proclaimed: My Life and Hard Times is one of the most deeply humorous books of our century. Not a “Memoir” that takes into account the crumbling of empires, rather it talks “largely about small matters and smally about great affairs. Mostly it’s about the wholly incredible things people do when they think they’re acting with common sense. Yet after the laughter is finished, Thurber has done more than tickle your risibilities. He has quietly and unobtrusively, but permanently, deflated your false pride in the essential sanity and prudence of the human race.”

Huh? The editor that wrote that must have been in a bar matching drinks with Thurber. What a hoot!

Yet, oddly, if you reread it, a glimmer of dash and sanity shines through.

I’ve got it! That was Thurber writing the jazzed up, jabberwockey blurb about his own book! All nonsense aside, the book contains some of the best stories he had ever written – or ever would. There are only nine selections, but the majority of them are classics. For instance, choose between “The Night the Bed Fell,” “The Night the Ghost Got In,” “The Dog That Bit People” and the unforgettable “The Day the Dam Broke.” In that last one, Thurber stirs up hilarious images drawn from the famed flood of 1913 when a good portion of Franklinton was underwater. Who can ever forget the frantic folk fleeing out East Broad Street when they heard that the Dam had broken? He tells us how they were encumbered by his grandfather, saber in hand, who thought all the confusion was caused by an invasion of Civil War calvarymen. At Parsons Avenue and East Town Street they had to stun the old gentleman or they would have been engulfed by the imaginary waters. There are three drawings that accompany the story, one show men, women, and dogs fleeing out East Broad Street. Another shows a woman atop the “These Are My Jewels” statue in front of the State Capitol.
Pure Thurber.

All of the stories are autobiographical, if you bear in mind they are told with tongue in cheek. And, a wink of the eye.
Looking back on it, we can see that he was walking a tightrope.

Psychoanalyzing himself. Playing the role of his own shrink – at bargain prices.

Consider: He was still married to Althea, but separated. He had a small daughter, Rosemary, who was living with her mother in Connecticut. He was running around with his arty friends in New York.

Writing these stories was his way of compensating. Keeping his life in balance.

By reliving – revisiting – those early days, and putting a humorous spin on them, he was treating us to some great writing.
And, leaving some hard-to-fill footprints in the sand.

If you haven’t read My Life and Hard Times, get yourself a copy. Your neighborhood library probably has a copy, or check one of the numerous used bookstores in Columbus. You’ll be glad you did!

(NOVEMBER 2005) Episode Ninety-One

1933 proved to be a good year for James Thurber.

He was surviving his separation from Althea and having a pretty good time in the process.

His job at The New Yorker was going well and he was turning out a steady stream of articles, as well as numerous drawings.
In his leisure time, he was seen about town with one or another of three or four very attractive women. And, when he was bored, or didn’t have a date, he would sometimes show up at Polly Adler’s famous establishment.

Oh, there’s no doubt that he was still overdrinking but, according to some of his close friends, he was getting more of a handle on it. Not falling-down drunk. Keeping everything under control the best he could with an eye out for getting safely home to bed – or at least into a girlfriend’s bed.

In April of that year he had a memorable encounter with the noted writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The big event happened one night when he was in Tony’s, a favorite hangout of the New York literary set. Thurber had walked over to Tony’s after leaving the New Yorker’s offices about 10 p.m., and he immediately picked up on the stir that famous writer’s presence was making.

Re-creating the scene, it probably went something like this:

After ordering a drink, Thurber elbowed his way to the end of the bar where Tony was taking orders and mixing drinks.

There were a lot of women in the bar and that meant lots of fancy mixed drinks. Pleasant and titillating concoctions with names like Tom Collins, Manhattan, Bloody Mary, Gin Rickey, and dozens of others.

According to those present, Thurber asked Tony to introduce him to Fitzgerald. I suppose that might be a little stiff and formal today. But, that’s what happened.

Tony obliged Thurber, led him over to the table where Fitzgerald was sitting alone and introduced the two men to each other. They shook hands and Fitzgerald asked Thurber to sit down.

Well, the two men got along like long-separated brothers. Fitzgerald was in a festive mood. Another novel, Tender Is the Night, was on the verge of being published, and he was also caught up in the excitement of an art exhibit featuring the works of his wife, Zelda. Fitzgerald explained that Zelda was not attending the opening because she was “in the midst of another breakdown.”

When they got tired of Tony’s, they moved on to another bar. And so it went, hour after hour, one bar after another. A lot of them evidently after-hours joints. Maybe holdovers from the prohibition era which had ended shortly before.

They apparently found out they had a lot in common, because they were still boozing and talking when the sun finally came up.

Can you believe it? Don’t forget they had gotten started around 10 o’clock the previous night.

Thurber later wrote about their meeting in an article titled “Scott in Thorns.”

He describes how they hit it off from the very beginning and what a rich mother lode of life experiences they shared.

Both were writers – each having monumental matrimonial problems with their wives and, as far as that was concerned, with all women.

So they commiserated with each other into the wee hours of the night – and beyond.

At one point Fitzgerald asked Thurber if he knew any “good girls” they could visit. In spite of the hour, Thurber obliged his new friend by calling several of his girlfriends and – surprisingly – Paula Trueman told them to give her a half hour and come on over.

They hopped into a cab and went to her place where they spent a couple of hours, with Fitzgerald doing most of the talking.

Thurber, evidently, was running out of steam, and who can blame him? But it had been an exciting and eye-opening experience:

He had discovered another writer with more problems than he had.

(OCTOBER 2005) Episode Ninety

As the hot summer of 1932 dragged into early fall, Thurber continues to write, and draw, and drink. He wasn’t alone in these endeavors. Some other big names in the literary world were playing the same strenuous game. Count among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, and John O’Hara.

High flyers, one and all, the alcohol firing up their talent.

And, remember, back then there were no computers or word processors. It was hunt and peck on some old beat-up typewriter. Or worse still, scratching out their copy in longhand and then trying to decipher it through bleary eyes the next morning. Also recall that the stock market had crashed in 1929, on what came to be known as Black Monday, and the deadly inertia of the Depression set in soon after.

There was plenty to talk about that fall of 1932, and you can bet James Thurber was in the thick of it. By the end of the year, there were over 13 million unemployed and the wages of those lucky enough to have a job were 60-some percent less than in 1929.

During the presidential campaign, Roosevelt accused Hoover of “reckless’ and “extravagant” spending. And, there were all kinds of countercharges like Roosevelt being inexperienced. Well, not exactly. He had been Secretary of the Navy and then Governor of New York State. In November, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt trounced Republican Herbert Hoover in a landslide victory in the national election. Of the popular vote, Roosevelt got 22,809,638 to Herbert Hoover’s 15,768,901. But it was in the electoral college that Roosevelt beat the tar out of Hoover – 472 to Hoover’s 59.

Even more exciting news was just around the corner. Prosperity? Not yet. That would take a while. What we’re talking here is the repeal of prohibition, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, that bug-a-boo action that had attempted to make the United States free of alcohol – but had actually resulted in just the opposite. It had endured for over twelve years, before it got the axe, the only Constitu-tional Amendment to meet such a fate. Interestingly enough, this lofty ruling had its roots right here in Central Ohio – over in Westerville, home of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In James Thurber’s backyard, you might say. Before the amendment was repealed, there was increased alcoholism, a much higher death rate from drinking due to rot gut whiskey, and an increase in crime rate. Everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong.

Before the repeal, a bloody shootout between bootleggers and law enforcement officers occurred in Columbus. As a matter of fact, it happened right here in the Short North. There was a big old hotel located on the northwest corner of Goodale and High. On the Goodale side, in the basement, there was a little bar, a little speakeasy, caught in the middle trying to satisfy their customers. Breaking the law. One night, the cops had it out with the bootleggers who were supplying the spot and the blood ran in the street. Three policemen killed. I don’t know how many of the other guys got it.

In the meantime, the legislative process slowly grinds away and on December 5th the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th Amendment goes into effect when Utah becomes the 36th state to ratify it. What had been called the “noble experiment” is banished. You can bet the occasion was cause for a lot of celebrating by Thurber and his friends. Old habits had to be unlearned and new ones adopted. His crowd didn’t have to sneak around pushing buzzers and saying “Joe sent me” to the faces that appeared in the little trapdoors.

A new era had dawned.

(SEPTEMBER 2005) Episode Eighty-Nine

Ask any drinker and they will tell you that their favorite bars are like social clubs. So it was with James Thurber.

They were places where he connected, kept in touch with old friends and new acquaintances. But in Thurber’s case, there was more to it than that.
A lot more. It was as if this tortured and creative soul was reaching out, desperately trying to make some kind of sense out of the hectic world he found himself in. Trying to put it all together. Trying to make some sense out of all the blathering, the cheap talk, and easy solutions.

Drink in hand, he would just walk up to a guy, or a gal, or a couple, even if they were perfect strangers, and start talking about whatever was on his mind at the moment.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could slip the bonds of time and return briefly to those scenes? To have walked about, unseen, in the midst of all the chatter and clatter – looking for James Thurber. Soaking up the sultry voice of a torch singer emanating from one of the early juke boxes. And, don’t forget, this was still the era of the flapper, high-cut, tight dresses and rouged lips.

There he is! Thurber is a tall figure, six feet or more, and he’s wearing a gray tweed suit with a white shirt and a striped tie. He’s holding forth in front of a booth full of people, and there are half a dozen other folks around him. He’s got a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – and he’s going at it a mile-a-minute! Every now and then, he will put his drink on the table or snub out his cigarette in an ashtray before lighting up a new one. Now he’s free to use his hands as he talks, and does he ever. And, he’s so into his subject he’s practically dancing a little jig!

It’s noisy in the barroom and hard to hear what he’s saying, but it’s obvious he has the attention of everyone around him. What a blast! No wonder he’s addicted to this way of life. He is like a one-man theatre.

Every once in a while, we can hear a few of his words. “If anyone ever wished they were in hell . . . it was during that perilous and frightful day in 1913 . . . when everyone in Columbus thought the dam broke.” What a joy to have studied his face as he earnestly pursued this topic or that. Sometimes about the economy. Sometimes politics. It’s obvious he’s developing material for future stories or drawings.

As we have already seen, we know that he frequently would talk about growing up in Columbus, go on and on with hilarious stories about his mother and other members of his family. So, these conversations were verbal and mental calisthenic. By telling the story, he was bringing it up into the foreground of his memory, polishing the details, shaping the episode for the day he would commit it to paper. So, there was great method to his madness. In the world of artists that is an under-statement. In Thurber’s case, we are dealing with multiple talents: the ability to sculpt the written word, then reduce it in its simplest terms to a humorous drawing often loaded with hidden meaning.

But, there were storm signals flyin’ in the wind. By the end of 1932, his friend and co-worker E. B. White at the New Yorker was genuinely concerned about Thurber’s behavior. He commented:

“Wolcott Gibbs, during that sad time, once remarked about Jim that he was the nicest guy in the world up to five o’clock in the afternoon. Gibbs was right. Jim was good until his third drink and then sometimes he became a madman, tempestuous and foul-mouthed. I spent a lot of evenings with him but I didn’t enjoy them. Jim had it in for women and he was obnoxious about it. He would lash out at the nearest woman and one night the nearest woman was my wife Katharine. I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t hit a one-eyed man.”

(To be continued)

(AUGUST 2005) Episode Eighty-Eight

The year is 1932. Smack-dab in the middle of prohibition – but there were plenty of places to get a drink. Make no mistake about that!
The country is in the grips of the Great Depression, unemployment is widespread, and veterans are selling apples on street corners.

In a speech, the Governor of New York state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, refers to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” thus setting the stage for his presidential campaign. He will run against the GOP candidate, Herbert Hoover. Adolph Hitler is ready to assume public office in Germany at the invitation of President Paul von Hindenburg. The country is in economic and political turmoil.

And, how is our hometown boy faring in the big city during these hectic and troublesome times? He is 37 years old and already getting apprehensive about his age. He is drinking way too much, as we will see shortly, and his fertile mind continues to spew out weird drawings of quirky little animals, disconsolate men, and hatchet-faced women. With two books to his credit, a wife and daughter tucked away in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, his job at the New Yorker secure, and with his continued freedom in New York City, how could any man as footloose as Thurber ask for anything more?

Not only that, he was beginning to experience a degree of recognition now evident wherever he went. A nudge in the ribs, a whispered remark, a knowing look. It's not exactly clear if he was comfortable with this newfound fame, maybe yes, maybe not all that much, maybe it depended on the mood he was in or how many alcoholic drinks he had consumed. Anyway, there wasn't all that much adulation apparent in his daily rounds of his favorite haunts. People he knew well weren't likely to kowtow to him. And, for all his newfound fame, he really hadn't changed very much.

Still the same. Mildly pleasant. Talkative. Always seeking center stage. Stubborn. One-track mind. Unpredictable. Frequently obstreperous when he had had a few drinks, and these days he was having more than a few.

He was turning the days and nights around.

A typical routine would go something like this: He would work a few hours at the New Yorker office during the early afternoon, then head out the door. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to his comings and goings – or anyone else's. Ross had grown to trust him because he always got his work in on time. And, to be perfectly honest, the New Yorker office during those years was a pretty bizarre and disorganized place. A lot of coming and going with everybody looking out for themselves, a sort of “live and let live” philosophy prevailing. Once out of the office, he might have a late lunch, usually with a friend. Dozen of places to choose from, practically all of them within walking-distance.

But, a pattern was becoming discernible. He, or his lunch partner, would start things off with a round of drinks. This would grease the slides for the lively conversation that was apt to follow, and as we have already seen there was plenty to talk about. One drink would follow another and sometimes lunch was totally forgotten, or became just an afterthought, a sandwich or a snack. And, let me remind you again, all of this was happening during Prohibition. They were going to speakeasies or establishments that looked the other way when a patron wanted some alcohol. After a couple of hours, if his luncheon companion had other commitments, instead of returning to the office, Thurber would just change bars, head down the street to another of his favorite haunts. And, new worlds to conquer.

(JULY 2005) Episode Eighty-Seven

Baby Rosemary safely delivered in a New York hospital, Althea didn’t waste any time leaving her on-again-off-again husband in the big city and returning to Connecticut with her newborn. According to friends of the couple, she wasn’t exactly thrilled with her dual role of mother and father – but what’s a woman to do? And, it’s doubtful that anyone ever fully understood Althea’s intentions and motivations.

Thurber, like many a man before him – especially those stuck with a job in the big city – became a weekend father.

In a rather surprising critique, his friend E. B. White observed that “Thurber was too egotistical in the early 1930’s to be an ideal father.”

He went on to add, “He was the most self-centered man I’ve ever known, but he did love Rosie.” “It showed through,” he said.

After a year or two had passed, Thurber became more comfortable with his role of father, even though it was only on weekends and occasional holidays.

In a letter to his old drinking buddy John McNulty he wrote: “ . . . Rosemary used to glance in my direction with about the same interest she had in a window pane or a passing char woman. It wasn’t until she was two and realized she was stuck with me that she said, during a walk through autumn leaves, ‘I love you’ . . .”

How could he have not appreciated his role as father after such a heart-warming experience?

During the week, there were editorial features to write and cartoons to draw for the insatiable appetite of The New Yorker. And, that’s not to say he didn’t enjoy the continuation of his carefree bachelor life with all its perks.

In the meantime, Thurber’s literary and artistic star was rising. His wonderfully screwy drawing of the barking seal on the headboard above a disgruntled looking couple streaked across the literary skies like a dazzling meteor. Publishers were now knocking on his door. What a change a year can make! Harper & Brothers decided they wanted to publish a collection of his drawings titled, “The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments.”

Thurber worked night and day to complete enough new drawings to fill the book’s projected number of pages. And, he did it. Most of the new drawings were surprisingly good considering the speed with which they were produced. There were a total of eighty-five drawings in the book, only fifty-five which had previously appeared in The New Yorker.

Many of the drawings are autobiographical in that they represent events and episodes in his own life. That a lot of them depict an on-going “Battle of the Sexes” is not surprising.
Dorothy Parker wrote the introduction for the little book. We’re talking the Dorothy Parker, fellow member of the staff at The New Yorker. A brilliant humorist in her own right. A member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. That Dorothy Parker.

Here’s some of what she had to say:

“ . . . These are strange people that Mr. Thurber has turned loose upon us. They seem to fall into three classes – the playful, the defeated, and the ferocious. All of them have the outer semblance of unbaked cookies: the women are of a dowdiness so overwhelming that it becomes tremendous style . . . “There is about all these characters, even the angry ones, a touching quality. They expect so little of life: they remember the old discouragements and await the new. They are not shrewd people, nor even bright, and we must all be very patient with them. Lambs in a world of wolves, they are, and there is on them a protracted innocence . . . “Of the birds and animals so bewilderingly woven into the lives of the Thurber people it is best to say but little. Those tender puppies, those fair-haired hounds – I think they are hounds – that despondent penguin – one goes all weak with sentiment. No man could have drawn, much less thought of, those creatures unless he felt really right about animals.”

The book was a big hit and the rest is history.

(JUNE 2005) Episode Eighty-Six

Does art imitate life? Or is it the other way around? Life imitates art?

In James Thurber’s case there seems to have been a large amount of both going on. He portrayed many of the ironies of life in his drawings. That’s art imitating life. The hatchet-faced ferocious females intimidating the baffled and befuddled males.

When baby Rosemary Thurber rode into this world, it was on the winds of a hurricane. The muse of art had returned the favor – with a vengeance. Just hours before Rosemary saw the light of day, her father and mother had engaged in a shouting match of Wagnerian proportions. No. More than that. It was much like a street brawl. Nasty. No holds barred. All the dirty linen trotted out and used as ammunition.

What were they screaming and raving about? Who knows?

They were back in New York City then, having returned from Sandy Hook, Connecticut a short time before. During the summer, they had spent some vacation time there and in a moment of compassion – or weakness – he had bought an attractive little Colonial bungalow on 20 acres.

By all accounts they were actually sleeping together, and that hadn’t happened very much during the entire rocky course of their marriage. Thus, Althea’s pregnancy.

But there was a fly in the ointment. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure that he was the father of the expected child. Sound familiar?This was probably part of what the fight was about. Seems he had a fixation about some guy that Althea had met on the beach that summer, a “chinless wonder,” he called him.

So, on the night of the big brawl, Thurber stormed out into the night, left Althea, “big with child,” alone in their little flat. He hit some of his favorite bars, called his old flame Ann Honeycutt, went bar-hopping with her and got totally slushed.

Returning to the apartment, he went on another rampage that resulted in his knocking a vase of flowers off a piano and ramming his hand through a glass door. A little later he showed up “dazed and bloody” at the apartment of Jap Gude and his wife.

They managed to calm him down, bandage his hand, and put him up for the night on their couch. What had set off this terrible night of self-destructive behavior? We will never know for sure, but the scenario running through his head might well have been something like this:

If not the right baby but the wrong father, perhaps the right baby, but the wrong mother. More likely the latter. At any rate, the horrible night was over, disappearing on time’s horizon like a dissipated tropical storm. And, how did Althea spend the rest of the night?

She was experiencing labor pains so she checked into Doctor Hospital. where Dr. Virgil “Duke” Damon, an OSU grad and former fraternity brother of Thurber’s, delivered her baby without any complications. The next day, when a bedraggled and hungover Thurber heard the news, he made his way to the hospital where he viewed the new arrival and apologized to Althea for his behavior.

Years later, in a syndicated article, Althea was quoted as saying: “He looked dreadfully (sic), and as he walked around the bed I saw one of his hands was covered with blood, and then he said he had been in some sort of a – he had been out all night and had been in some kind of an altercation, and put his hand through a taxi window, and then the nurse came on duty and they took him out.

By the way, once they had a look at the baby, friends and acquaintances alike said that there was no doubt that the baby was Thurber’s.

(MAY 2005) Episode Eighty-Five

By the end of 1931, the United States was suffering the full effects of the Great Depression. Millions of people were unemployed and World War I veterans were selling apples on street corners.

People were working for 25 cents an hour, or less, if they were lucky enough to have a job. Hundreds of banks closed down. It was scary.

Everything was dirt cheap. You could buy a hamburger for a nickel, a quart of milk for 8 cents, and purchase a house for a couple of thousand, or less. The problem was hardly anybody had any money.

Herbert Hoover was president, prohibition was still the law of the land, Wiley Post and Harold Gatly flew around the world in eight days, fifteen hours, and fifty-one minutes.

And, James Thurber was sitting on top of the world.

He was working full time at the New Yorker, his quirky little drawings of domineering women, downtrodden men, and funky looking little animals now appearing in its pages regularly – and his second book, The Owl in the Attic, was published less than two years after the first.

And, surprise of surprises! Althea, his once estranged wife, had just presented him with a daughter.

How could he have not been happy? Hadn’t he just fulfilled at least three of the major components of immortality?

Which three are those? – you might ask. Well, if you don't know, I'll tell you.

One is creativity in art. Another is creativity in literature. And, the third is biological reproduction. Some would argue that this is the most important of the three, but that is debatable and best left for each to decide for himself, or herself.

Being a good person would be still another door to immortality, but Thurber might have been on shaky ground in that regard. In the final analysis it would depend on whom you talked to. He could be a real hell-raiser when he was drinking, and there are many eye-witness accounts of some of his shenanigans.

Let me be quick to point out that there are other pathways to what we perceive as immortality. Finding them depends on where you are coming from and what you perceive as the truth. All of this can be a touchy subject, and that’s enough said!

In Thurber's case, he deserved a lot of extra credit because of the huge handicap laid upon him by the loss of one eye and the unreliability of the remaining one.

One eye gone and the other one on the blink, you might say.

As anyone who has had eye problems can tell you, the quality of their vision can change from one day to the next.

What was worse, every now and then, seemingly for no reason at all, Thurber's remaining eye would just shut down, quit functioning, go blotto – leaving him totally unnerved. This happened one day at the office when he was talking to a co-worker and it scared him half to death.

So you see, even though he was sitting on top of the world, it was a wobbly world, much like the one portrayed in many of his drawings. Who would expect it to be otherwise?

Like in that old song, “raindrops keep falling on my head.” True for all of us, at various times.

Now, I suppose you want to know all about how this baby came to be born.

Most of Thurber's friends doped it out this way.

Althea, they figured, had gotten wind of Thurber running around on her. Especially with cute little Paula Trueman a winsome lass he had long had the hots for.

One day, on one of his visits to Connecticut, she probably looked at her husband with adoring eyes and whispered, “Let's give it another go. I'll move in with you.”

The chronology of events is a bit murky, as they often are in such cases, and you can almost imagine some of these scenes being portrayed in his own cartoons.

Like her informing him that she was pregnant.

“You're what?!” he might well have responded.

“I'm with child,” she undoubtedly said. “Your child.”

Whatever, hadn't she given up her dearly loved dog shows just so she could move in with her husband?!

Thus it was that when the allotted time expired, the couple were blessed with a bouncing baby girl: Enter Rosemary Thurber, born October 7, 1931.

A bright spot in the midst of gloomy times.

The only child he would ever have – that we know of.

Episode Eighty-Four
(April 2005)

To his dying day, Harold Ross denied that he had rejected Thurber's first seal drawing.

No matter. Actually it's a good thing he did, otherwise the later version that became famous might never have seen the light of day.

Shortly after the cartoon appeared in the January 30, 1932, issue of the New Yorker, Thurber received a telegram from famed humorist Robert Benchley congratulating him. High praise indeed. As a token of gratitude, Thurber sent him the original artwork.

A few of Thurber’s drawings had appeared in the magazine over the preceding year and a half. Mostly they were witty caricatures of animals placed under the heading “Our Pet Department.”
The most famous cartoon to emerge from this menagerie was a drawing of a horse with antlers tied to its head.

A horse with antlers tied to its head? Is that what I just said! What a weird and goofy idea.
Only Thurber could have come up with such a cockeyed concept. Especially back in those drab and dreary days of excessive moral repression.

Aside: I wonder where that word came from? I'm talking about “cockeyed.” Somebody please check it out and let us all know - before the local authorities have it banished from our dictionaries. Put the answer in letter form and we’ll publish it. I promise! This could be your big chance to rub shoulders with the famous and illustrious James Thurber himself, albeit at a considerable distance. So get a move on!

Meanwhile back to the storyline. Where was I? Oh, yes, the famous horse that has a pair of antlers tied onto his head. Like, real obvious.
And, there's a caption of sorts under the drawing that goes like this:

“Q. My husband paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars for this moose to a man in Dorset, Ontario, who said he had trapped it in the woods. Something is wrong with the antlers, for we have to keep twisting them back into place all the time. They're loose. – Mrs. Oliphant Beatty

A. You people are living in a fool's paradise. The animal is obviously a horse with a span of antlers strapped onto his head. If you really want a moose, dispose of the horse; if you want to keep the horse, take the antlers off. Their constant pressure on his ears isn't a good idea.”

Thurber's cartoons were now appearing regularly in the New Yorker.

And, he was dashing off drawings everywhere he went.

Every day, at work and at play and, seemingly, everyplace in between. The floodgates were open.

At cocktail parties he would scribble drunken likenesses of drunken women on cocktail napkins, menus, the backs of envelopes. Darn near anything.

He would give drawings to favorite bartenders and waitresses. Maybe, in return, he was getting a lot of his drinks on the house. That would be a pretty good deal for all parties concerned.

In a letter to his old friend Herman Miller he once wrote, “I have yet to meet anybody I have ever known, even casually, who hasn't got at least one of my drawings.”

Around the office, dozens of crumpled-up drawings would end up in the wastebasket. False starts. False farts. Some little tally-wag wrong. Assigned to the city dump. Or, hopefully, salvaged by some savvy janitor or maid.

Before the end of 1931, another collection of Thurber's cartoons and witty observations on life was published. This one was titled The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities. The book was dedicated to his wife Althea.

And, hold onto your hats!
On October 7, 1931, Althea presented him with a bouncing baby daughter, Rosemary.

Well, this was certainly a big surprise. They hadn't been living together since who knows when. Well, he had been visiting her once in a while, going to dog shows and all that kind of bow-wow stuff.

Well, whatever, our boy was on a creative roll of major proportions. New editions of all kinds popping up all over.

Episode Eighty-Three
(March 2005)

Is Sex Necessary? co-authored by James Thurber and E. B. White and published by Harpers became an overnight success. It was on the best-seller lists and received favorable reviews in newspapers across the country. Thurber and his pal Andy White were elated. The two New Yorker writers basked in the limelight. Columbus newspapers were full of pictures and articles about the two hometown celebrities.
When Thurber made a trip to Columbus in February 1930 for the 50th anniversary of his fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, word of his newly won fame preceded his appearance.

Amidst all the good ol’ boy back-slapping, he was the center of attention. He was also invited to be the speaker at a Sigma Delta Chi luncheon and gave a talk to an OSU journalism class. Oddly enough, a number of people noticed that he seemed ill-at-ease. A reporter for the Ohio State Lantern, the student newspaper, wrote: “He looked sad and answered questions with either ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘No.’”

No one ever figured out what was on his mind. Maybe Althea. Maybe he missed her poodle. Whatever. He was a complicated human being. All of this was happening within months of the horrendous stock market collapse of October 29, 1929, that preceded the Great Depression. Meanwhile, back at the New Yorker, Harold Ross was bewildered and befuddled by this turn of events. Two of his star writers were getting all this attention for something that had never been printed in the pages of his beloved magazine. The New Yorker was his entire world, so you can imagine the thunderous thoughts that rumbled through his head.

To make matters worse, those crazy drawings that Thurber dashed off for the book were also receiving critical acclaim.

“How I pity me!? he would moan to whoever would listen. But, then, something must have clicked in Ross’ mind. From an attitude of indifference and outright derision of Thurber’s peculiar little drawing, he suddenly changed.

Funny thing about human nature, isn’t it? We see it every day. In the workplace, amongst friends, at home. In politics? Oh, yes! On the national and international scene. All the time. There are plenty of clichés and platitudes to explain such changes of heart. Among them would be: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” and it’s also called “jumping on the bandwagon.”
So, the following little exchange took place not long after Thurber got back to New York.


One day at the office, Ross asked Thurber where “the goddamn seal drawing was.” Thurber looked up from his desk, probably frowned, and reminded him that it had been rejected and that he’d thrown it away. Ross asked him to draw it again and Thurber assured him that he would. As you may recall, that was the drawing of the seal with the weird-looking whiskers that was sitting on a rock.

Well, oddly enough, the subject seems to have slipped both of their busy minds for awhile because it wasn’t until over a year later that Thurber got around to the task of redrawing the cartoon.
And, of course, as we would surely expect by now (knowing Thurber as we do) the results were not as predicted. Seems that when he started drawing the rock, his pen went astray as if it had a mind of its own and the rock ended up looking more like the headboard of a bed. And, of course, there was the seal draped across the headboard.

So, naturally, like any good artist, Thurber went with the flow. He added a little bit of bed. Then he put a befuddled looking virago into the bed with her baffled-looking mate beside her.
The next step was to add a new caption. Easily done – for Thurber, that is. The inspired new caption read: “All right, have it your way – you heard a seal bark!”

This cartoon ran in the January 30, 1932, issue of the New Yorker.

It made history.

Episode Eighty-Two
Feburary 2005

Nineteen twenty-nine was a good year for James Thurber. More and more of his articles were appearing in the New Yorker, and his funny little drawings were receiving some attention from the magazine's editors - thanks to E. B. White. Even more unexpected was the almost spontaneous idea for a book that he and White hatched up. The catchy little title they chose was Is Sex Necessary? Why You Feel the Way You Do.

And guess what? The spoofy satirical pieces in the collaborated collection of essays (eventually published) were illustrated with Thurber's drawings, over 50 of them! Like the inhabitants of a funny farm, these quirky and querulous characters were waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting public.

The two men put the manuscript and the drawings in a cardboard box and personally delivered it to the offices of Harper & Brothers. The publishing house had recently purchased a small book of poems by White. So, that was an advantage, not to speak of being able to hop in a cab, go a few blocks, and be at a publisher's doorstep.

After arriving at Harper's, they asked to see Eugene Saxton, one of the editors. When he appeared, they spread out the contents of the box on the floor, each of the eight chapters in its own little pile, the drawings in another.

Big surprise. Even though Saxton wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea, the powers-that-be at Harper's decided to give the book a whirl.

It appeared in bookstores on November 29, just a few weeks after “Black Friday,” the stock market crash that was the forerunner of the Great Depression. But, fortunately, the faltering economy didn't phase the unexpected and enthusiastic reception the book received.

In its first year, the book sold over 50,000 copies. Must have been the catchy title, huh? Or you might say, another victory for the power of sex?

The success of the book surprised everybody. Thurber and White were elated, of course. And to say that the publisher was happy would be an understatement. Today, the book is in its 25th printing and still chugging along.

As for the drawings, they were generally well received by critics and laymen alike. Who could not like them? Well, admittedly a few old farts and crusty curmudgeons probably fell out of their chairs when they eyed the daffy doodle-like drawings with their satirical captions. True, many of the drawings defy rational explanation, but therein lies a great deal of their charm.

Put another way, where one person might shrug them off as the simplistic scribbling of a child, or maybe the demented doodling of a madman, another would see them as a brilliant synthesis of the human condition.

E. B. White perhaps described this mysterious element best in the following excerpt from the “notes” that prefaced the book:
“. . . When one studies the drawings, it soon becomes apparent that a strong undercurrent of grief runs through them. In almost every instance the man in the picture is badly frightened, or even hurt. These 'Thurber men' have come to be a recognized type in the world of art; they are frustrated, fugitive beings; at times they seem vaguely trying to get out of something without being seen (a room, a situation, a state of mind), at other times they are merely perplexed and too humble, or weak, to move. The women, you will notice, are quite different: temperamentally they are much better adjusted to their surroundings than the men, and mentally they are much less capable of making themselves uncomfortable.”

(To be continued)

Episode Eighty-One
January 2005

In good times and bad, the creative spirit in James Thurber burned bright. It didn't seem to make any difference whether he and Althea were at each other's throats, whether they were contemplating divorce, or living apart and dating whoever came along.

Before 1929 was over, this was becoming more and more apparent as he continued to churn out creative copy for the New Yorker. But a funny, unexpected thing was happening; a new beastie was being born. While he was ratcheting up his output of writing, another creative muse started kicking in more and more frequently.

Enter the cartooning muse. Oh, it had been around for a long time, actually, since he was knee high to a duck. All the way back to when he was five or six years old. This was a muse that had accompanied him through thick and thin, unacknowledged, but faithfully sticking with him. It was called doodling back then. At school, or doing homework, or almost anytime he found himself with pencil and paper in hand. He would scribble.

It's true that a few of his scribbles had seen the light of day when he contributed to the Sundial at Ohio State and, probably, a few more during the brief time he worked for the Columbus Dispatch. But nothing ever really came of them. And, the truth is that there was not much about those drawings that was distinguishing.

Enter E. B. White.

In 1929, at the New Yorker, Thurber was still sharing an office with this tremendously gifted writer. Neither one of them minded the cramped quarters and they had become fast friends. “Andy” White had long been aware of Thurber's doodling habit. How could he not? The doodles were everywhere. On scraps of paper on Thurber's desk, overflowing in the wastebasket, on memo pads, on the walls, in the hallway of the old building, in the elevator. Even in the telephone booth out in the hall. Especially in the telephone booth. Of course! That's where even the most neophyte doodler feels compelled to do his thing.

Many of the drawings were of dogs, sad-eyed, droopy-eared hound dogs. But White was probably the first person to notice any artistic merit in Thurber's constant and compulsive doodling. One day he spotted a crazy-looking seal that Thurber had scrawled on a piece of paper. The seal, with whiskers askew, seemed to be staring at a couple of far away dots. Under the drawing Thurber had written the following caption: “Hm, explorers.”

White thought the drawing and its caption immensely amusing and submitted it for consideration to the weekly art meeting. He was a member of this little group, as was Harold Ross and several other editors. The members of the group, including the art director, didn't know what to make of this strange bewildered-looking little animal. Rea Irvin, the art director handed the drawing back to White with a sigh - and a sketch of what a seal was supposed to look like.

Whomp! That was the sickening sound of rejection. But White was a persevering sort of person. He resubmitted the drawing with a note attached that said, “This is the way a Thurber seal's whiskers go.”

The drawing was rejected again.

Not one to give up easily, in the following weeks, White submitted other Thurber drawings. Sometimes he would ink them in to make them a little bit bolder, but all to no avail. The drawings kept coming back! To add insult to injury, one day his hard-headed boss, Harold Ross said to Thurber, “How the hell did you get the idea you could draw?” Thurber evidently kept his thoughts to himself because there is no record of any response.

The truth probably was that at this stage in his career he wasn't taking his drawing too seriously. For that matter, never in his lifetime did he truly consider himself an artist. His drawings were just a way to amuse himself - and maybe others if they were tuned in to his wavelength.

More likely, a way to siphon off frustration over his faltering relationships with women. It's all there in the drawings we have learned to cherish. So easy to perceive. Even for an amateur psychologist. The gimpy and frustrated sad-eyed men. The bossy looking carnivorous women. The sympathetic looking dogs and other animals.

Thank goodness E.B. White saw all this and recognized it as pure genius.

Thank goodness for friends!

Episode Eighty
December 2004

When he wasn't visiting his wife Althea in her rustic Connecticut cottage and trotting around to one dog show after another, Thurber was adjusting to his on-again-off-again bachelor life.

“When the cat’s away, the mice will play” goes the old adage, and in Thurber's case, he was proving to be quite an active mouse.

Dalliance is the word.

There were a number of fair damsels he was seen with around town. Trysts and rendezvous became the name of the game. Many of his dates were cute and cuddly. Sometimes the pair would have cocktails and dinner. Sometimes just drinks.

A lot of times he and his date would sit in a booth. More privacy, you know, and certainly darker. All the better for whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ear.

One attractive female companion was Paula Trueman, an actress who was a dead ringer for his old flame Ann Honeycutt. Maybe prettier.

Paula was an actress who had a part in “Grand Street Follies,” a stage show playing on Broadway.

She had read several of Thurber's pieces in the New Yorker, and being a bright and ambitious young lady, she dropped him a note explaining that she had read and admired his articles and went on to ask him if he would be interested in writing some new material for her, maybe a new routine in the show she was appearing in.

Thurber took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

They had lunch together, discussed her proposed project, met again, and again, and again . . .

Paula recalled later that Thurber never did get around to writing the skit for her. They talked about it a lot, but that's as far as it got.

“But we saw a lot of each other,” Paula reminisced.

The usual routine was for Thurber to pick her up after the show. Backstage, probably, and they would head for a bar. Maybe in a cab, more likely on foot. People who live in New York, believe it or not, do a lot of walking.

And, another thing to remember: In those prohibition days going to a bar meant going to a speakeasy, but there were plenty of those around.

Tony's was one of their favorite hangouts where they were sure to run into a lot of Thurber's friends and maybe even some of hers. People like Andy Whitem Wolcott Gibbs, and Bob Gates.

Once in a while Thurber's boss, Harold Ross, would show up. Paula thought he looked and acted like a taxi driver. That's good for a laugh, considering that Ross was the editor of the New Yorker! So much for going by appearances.

Paula wasn't a drinker, so she would just sip a soft drink, sit back and take it all in. The jokes, the witty remarks, comments on politics, the news and, of course, the latest gossip.

Whether Paula and Thurber had a sexual relationship is anyone's guess.

It appears that mostly she was just a good companion, an attractive woman to have on his arm and to be seen with. You know. To prove to other dudes that he had all the right stuff.

Paula was sensitive enough to realize that Thurber was suffering – in the marital department, that is. He might also have been uneasy about having only one good eye.

Shortly after they met, he explained how his brother William accidentally shot out one of his eyes with a handmade bow and arrow while they were reenacting the William Tell story. Paula recalled that Thurber wasn't too bitter about the accident and held no grudge against William.

She was not only a good listener, but Paula was also a shrewd student of human nature. Here are some more of her observations:

“I am an actress but it was Jim who was stage-struck. I think he really envied me my profession. He just plain loved to perform. He said it was so easy to succeed: You just had to be slightly better than the others who have no brains or talent. He had plenty of both. At one point he said he was going to leave Althea for good and he asked me to live with him. He even found an apartment, but later he said, 'Althea wants to come back to me,' and that was the end of a not very serious affair for a while.

“Another time, later, he was in my apartment, looking out the window, and he said, 'Let's get married.’ I looked out the window, too, and I said, 'No, I don't think so.'

“I never regretted it. But there was nobody else like Jim. “He was a complete individual, as a man and a writer.”

In the meantime, when he wasn't trying to be “the Playboy of the Western World,” Thurber was turning out some serious work for the New Yorker.

In 1929, he wrote twenty-nine published columns in addition to some miscellaneous articles.

(To be continued)

(From the Nov. '04 issue)
(Episode Seventy-nine)

As the weeks and months of 1929 spun by, Thurber’s marriage to Althea continued to unravel.


Finally, since nothing else seemed to work, they opted for a trial separation. You know, one of the slippery stepping stones on the way to reconciliation or, more probably, divorce.

It was not the first time they had lived apart, but probably the first time they actually sat down and worked out a plan. This time it was more deliberate, more thought out.

They gave up their New York apartment, and Althea took most of their meager belongings and headed for the burbs – Silvermine, Connecticut, to be exact. Just a hop, skip, and a martini from Westport. This was decidedly more to her liking. The country club set, you know. Ritzy, titzy. Uppity, beyond words.

There, in that rarified atmosphere, she rented a cozy little cottage and settled in with Jeannie and her litter of puppies. Happy as a bug in a rug.

So, what about our hero?

Deserted. Left behind in the big city to fend for himself.

Not too awful a fate compared to what he had been enduring. And even more dividends. Lots of freedom. Another chance to spread his wings, relax with friends, maybe even become more aware of the eye-candy hanging out in some of his favorite haunts. Not such a bad deal when you really think about it. No need to feel sorry for Mr. Thurber.

And, he had more time to concentrate on his writing, without constantly being interrupted. More important, he had peace of mind. No more perpetual bickering and fighting.

Without a permanent address, he was bopping around town between a number of low-cost hotels, and, in those days, they were very affordable.

Where did he eat? Chances are he hadn’t been getting many home-cooked meals anyway, so probably not much of a change there. The answer? Same old hash-houses and favorite establishments like Costello’s where he had been dining all along.

So far, so good.

Meanwhile, Althea was loving the country-like atmosphere she found herself in. Her Scottie loved it, and the puppies were in seventh heaven.

In no time at all, Althea acquired two Siamese cats and a black French poodle and her eleven puppies.

Eleven?!

You heard right.

Can you believe this? Within weeks of moving to Silvermine, Althea was the happy owner of what practically amounted to a petting zoo.

The poodle was a black standard named Medve, Hungarian for “bear.”

From all accounts, Medve was an extraordinary dog. A loving and doting mother, she was also a professional show dog. Knew all the ropes and had won a poodles’ caboodle of blue ribbons and trophies, including the “Best of Breed” in the Novice Class at the 1929 Westminster Show.

When the judges’ decision was announced, Althea burst into tears. And, can you believe this, Medve started howling too. Bawling, really. She had mistaken Althea’s crying as some kind of rejection.

On his visits, Thurber became completely captivated by Medve. As a matter of fact, she was to have a profound affect on his philosophy of life, his writing, and many of his future drawings. In other words, she was a catalyst. She opened up doors he didn’t even know existed.

Regrettably, Medve didn’t like going to dog shows because she invariably got car sick. Horribly car sick.

It got so they had to tie a rubber bib around her neck, and she sure didn’t like that. She also had to sit on a bunch of newspapers. She didn’t like that either.

As if all fuss and discomfort weren’t bad enough, sometimes she had to ride in the rumble seat and, when Thurber was in town, if it was raining, he had to sit back there and hold an umbrella over Medve’s head.

Can you picture it? What a comical sight that must have been!

In a piece titled “And So to Medve,” Thurber writes: “She threw up (on the newspaper) like a lady, leaning far down, looking as apologetic as she looked sick.”
Thurber’s visits to Connecticut grew fairly frequent because he discovered that he really liked the dog shows that Althea dragged him to.

Isn’t life strange?

He later wrote “ . . . At one of the last dog shows in which she was entered with two or three of her best male pups, she was reluctant to get up on the bench assigned to her and her family, and so I got up on it myself, on all fours, to entice her to follow. She was surprised and amused, but not interested, and this was also true of my wife, who kept walking by the bench, saying, out of the corner of her mouth, “Get off that bench, for the love of heaven! . . . “

(To be continued)

(From the Oct. '04 issue)

(Episode Seventy-eight)

". . . The precision and clarity of White's writing helped me a lot, slowed me down from the dogtrot of newspaper tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet . . .""

 That was James Thurber talking about the influence of E, B. White, his friend and associate at the New Yorker.

Under the watchful and kindly eye of "Andy" White, he had literally wrenched his often stilted and self-conscious phraseology into a simpler, more functional prose style. In effect he had liberated all the wild and fanciful ideas that wer