Joanna is once again in possession of the bell, which she will ring at 1 PM for our meeting. The sign-up sheet for next year will be available for those of you who haven't had the chance to pick a date or need to swap dates.
To our business:
Lori’s treasurer’s report: $528.06
We need to allot $175.00 to cover printing cost of our brochure. Joanna proposed we donate $150 to the Hastings Library to purchase books for the Yong Room (the renamed Children’s Library). We could purchase up to $150 of children’s books from the Barkin Bookstore to be donated to the Family Service Society of Yonkers’ literacy programs in Westchester summer camps. TBD.
An aside - from June 20, a report from Constance on the donation of children's books:
So you know, today the books we are purchasing from the Barkin bookstore were picked up, and will be taken to summer literacy programs in Ossining and Tarrytown run by the Family Service Society of Yonkers. This year we donated 199 books to the program. It is very gratifying to put those books to such a good purpose, and I always like to think that some of them may go to the children and grandchildren of the many hardworking people who wash cars, do yard work, and clean homes in our town and the surrounding areas.Thanks to everyone for your support, and especially to Mary, Carol, and Jacquie. I really couldn’t have organized it without them!
Members’ recommendations: lots of plays. Carol loved The United States Versus Ulysses (at the Irish Arts Center). Christine and Sharon were floored by Sarah Snook playing 26 parts in Portrait of Dorian Gray (at the Music Box). Carol also recommends: Pirates! The Penzance Musical and The Mistake (about the development of the A-bomb). Books: Christine recommended The Tobaccionist by Robert Seethaler; Jacquie recommended The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (note, do not confuse this with the film) and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Lori recommended Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Gita began her presentation on “The Letters and Diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh” by passing around a photo of the young and beautiful writer. Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906 in Englewood, New Jersey. Her father, Dwight Morrow, a partner of J. P. Morgan, was immensely wealthy; the $1 M estate taxes paid upon his death moved the budget of the state of New Jersey out of the red. Her mother, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, was a poet, a women’s education activist and a president of Smith College.
Anne was a student at Smith College when she met Charles Lindbergh in 1927; they were introduced at a Christmas party held in the American Embassy in Mexico City. Earlier that year, he had made his famous cross Atlantic solo flight. For her, it was love and hero worship at first sight.
(FYI – minutes will refer to him as Lindbergh, her as Anne)
Her life, first as Lindbergh’s fiancé, then his wife, changed completely. She had been bookish and shy; at his side, she stepped into the glare of celebrity. She learned to handle that, as well as to become an aviator and radio operator. She adored him, she adored the adventure of flying. She was 7 months pregnant when she and Lindbergh set a transcontinental flight speed record. Under constant scrutiny by the press, she learned to keep up a polite conversation without saying anything revealing; in addition to her other skills, she learned to be a savvy public figure. In her letters to her family, she said what she could not say publicly.
She and Lindbergh flew around the Pacific, starting in Long Island, going to Washington state, hugging the shoreline, landing in small towns from Alaska to Siberia to the Aleutian Islands to Japan and finally, China – where they crashed in the Yangtze River during a take-off. She rarely complained except for noting that after months of brushing her teeth with boiled water, she swallowed gallons of muddy Yangtze River water during the crash.
After the birth of the Lindbergh’s first child, they bought a house in NJ, near Anne’s parents. That house was where they became the victims of what the newspapers of 1932 called “the crime of the century.” Anne and Charles’ 20-month-old son, Charles Jr., was kidnapped. Waiting for news of their baby, pregnant with her second child, Anne wrote a letter every day to her mother-in-law. She tried to remain hopeful and to pass the hope on, by doing what had become her way of being: writing.
When the child was found, dead, she wrote that it was a finality, and that finalities can be accepted.
She may have found her special voice in the letters to her mother-in-law that she wrote during the terrible period between the kidnapping and the discovery of the child’s body. She re-read those letters years afterwards, noting how she tried to keep hope alive for herself and for her mother-in-law. The book of her essays, Gift from the Sea, is filled with hope fighting despair. It was received enthusiastically when it was published in 1955, resonating strongly with her readership. It remains in print.
Her style is confessional but never self-pitying. Writing from her heart, she revealed commonalities with women of her own generation and generations that followed. She wrote of certain “springs that are tapped when we are alone” and of the need to find “the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships.” She acknowledged the “inevitability of change in love and marriage, devotion and companionship.”
The Lindberghs never divorced although the marriage was deeply troubled. They were no longer living together when Lindbergh died in 1974. Anne died in 2001.
Respectfully submitted,
Frances Greenberg, Recording Secretary
