Betty MacDonald's sister Alison Bard Burnett
Betty MacDonald's mother Sydney with grandchild Alison Beck
Betty and Don MacDonald in Hollywood
Mary Bard Jensen and Betty MacDonald
Claire Dederer, Author of Poser : My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses
lives in Seattle and writes about books and culture for the New York Times, Vogue, Newsday, and many other publications.
Dear Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
I knew of the Betty MacDonald Fan Club but didn't know its activities were so extensive.
That's wonderful.
I checked in with the magazine and they said please feel free to reprint or repost.
I will keep you updated if I do any more pieces on Betty.
Thanks so much for all you are doing!
All the best,
Claire Dederer
Second Read — January / February 2011 Her Great Depression
Re-reading Betty MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest’s bust years
By Claire Dederer
From the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle, someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a book. A book that got published.
I was always on the lookout for a message, something that would tell me that this thing could be done. I realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a child, the message I sought was simple: This place is worth writing about.
Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. There were few nationally published authors from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, though I didn’t even pretend to enjoy it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy’s first memoir, but she seemed to hate the place.
And, eventually, I read Betty MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my mother’s shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by MacDonald: Anybody Can Do Anything.
I had seen it before but assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had mushroomed on my mother’s shelves over the past few years. Bored enough, I picked it up—and found therein an enchanted world. Enchanted because it was exactly real. Anybody Can Do Anything is Betty MacDonald’s story of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame house (not unlike my family’s) in the University District (just a mile or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me feel that I was seeing my life reflected in her pages.
It’s funny to think of a time when Betty MacDonald’s books were new to me. Over the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own neighborhood—with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. Her first book was The Egg and I, set in the 1920s. This chronicle of MacDonald’s life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This, putting aside her books for children, was followed by The Plague and I, a surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis sanitarium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of lying in bed for a year is one of life’s mysteries. Next came Anybody Can Do Anything, which I held in my hands. Finally she wrote Onions in the Stew, about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three years before she succumbed to cancer at the age of forty-nine.
But it was Anybody Can Do Anything, with its Seattle locale and its scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me.
As the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at twenty, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point with the rain, the chickens, the monomaniacal husband, the whole affair. “Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this,” she recounts, “I wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and I seemed to have married the wrong man.” She snatches up her little daughters and makes her long, rainy, difficult way back to the city by foot, bus, and ferry.
There she and her girls are folded happily back into her large family’s bosom. Her mother’s “eight-room brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living room, four elastic bedrooms…represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and luxury.”
The book describes life in that teeming, cozy household with her mother, her three sisters, her brother, and her two little girls, plus whoever else might be sleeping over in one of those elastic bedrooms. It also details the literally dozens of weird and none-too-wonderful jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression: hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas tree decorator, baby sitter, receptionist to a gangster.
The author jumps from job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves, like Tom Cruise running from an exploding warehouse. She’s hustled along in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister Mary, who considers herself an “executive thinker.”
Mary has a job ready for Betty as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm, never mind that Betty is utterly unqualified. Mary won’t hear of such talk. She is quick to admonish her sister: “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting for some employer to come creeping in looking for them.”
The truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle that emerges is definitively—though quietly—desperate. But on my first read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, “There was nothing in sight but wet pavement and wet sky.” MacDonald describes places that still existed, that I myself knew—the I. Magnin’s at the corner of Sixth and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on the Pike Place Market:
The Public Market, about three blocks long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds, yellows and greens of fresh succulent fruits and vegetables. From the hundreds of farmer’s stalls that lined both sides of the street and extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares. The Italians were the most voluble but the Japanese had the most beautiful vegetables.
Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did.
I saw, illustrated perfectly, and in the cold light of nonfiction, the possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s.
My mother told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it with a true feeling of awe: the niece of an author lived therein! Of course I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more than real; she was tangible. She was prima facie evidence that the materials I had at hand—those trees, that rain—were enough.
Other writers came and went; Betty MacDonald was among those who endured for me. This was because she was funny. No, that’s not quite right. Though I didn’t have the language for it when I first read her, Betty MacDonald was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure out just how she did it.
She wrote long, ridiculous set pieces about her various jobs. She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly of her family’s eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one’s own ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example of her rueful tone:
Until I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity. While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner, highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player, most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so coarse is what makes it look so thick.”
It almost goes without saying that she distinguishes herself in night school by being the absolute worst student in every class.
MacDonald was master of the comic memoirist’s first art: self-deprecation. Other types of memoirists value lyricism, or shock tactics. Comic memoirists are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest people in any given room.
I know whereof I speak—I am this year publishing a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called “nobody” memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such memoirists are “neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their kin.”
How, then, to proceed? You’re nobody. You want to write a memoir. Your first order of business is to let readers know that you know that they know you’re a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance as quickly as possible, and never, ever stop. By means of that simple dynamic, the memoirist makes a friend rather than an enemy of her reader.
In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald fails again and again. It’s an entire book about failure: her own, and the economy’s. It’s also about persisting in the face of one’s own admitted shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills, which she presents as nil: “I wanted some sort of very steady job with a salary, and duties mediocre enough to be congruent with my mediocre ability. I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and file clerk.”
Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency started in 1933 and charged with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. There she felt right at home, surrounded by federal-level incompetence: “There were thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it in ten copies.”
MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone. When she’s remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation, but that of the big-screen version of The Egg and I, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable. In the film, Ma and Pa Kettle—neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in the book—have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting caricatures. And the public loved them. On the movie poster, the faces of these two crackers loom huge; Colbert and MacMurray cower tinily in the corner. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were made about them and their fictional fifteen children, and Betty MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer.
Many years after all of this, I was having dinner with a British writer who had undertaken to write about the Northwest. “You have to be careful about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty MacDonald: housewife humor,” he said, finishing in scathing (if posh) tones. MacDonald has been trapped in this role of domestic lightweight. But her writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with, say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a mid-century housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what’s so bad about Erma Bombeck?)
What MacDonald models in her writing is actually very freeing—self-deprecation as a kind of passport to the ordinary. With it, you can take your reader into the most mundane details of your life, and they will often go.
I teach adult writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces about what they’ve achieved. About their good marriages. About their sterling qualities. “Nobody wants to hear about that except your mother!” I tell them. Which is never very popular. Even so, I try to explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: what people want to see in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If you can show readers that you have those same failures, those same smallnesses, and make them laugh about it, they will love you. Or at least like you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody.
These simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told with self-deprecating humor. But what MacDonald achieves in Anybody Can Do Anything is something more than that: a finely observed journalistic record of her time.
The ridiculous set pieces, the fond portraits of her family, and what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the “earthy tang” of her writing do not seem like indicators of a work of serious journalism. But MacDonald is getting down on paper what she sees happening all across Seattle, and ultimately providing us with a rough draft of history. The details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in the West during the 1930s. This is a cheerful, unassuming way of documenting a socially and economically turbulent period. But it’s documentation nonetheless.
Take, for example, MacDonald’s account of one of her earliest jobs. This chapter encapsulates the uneasiness of the early part of the Depression, eerily suggestive of the economic tenterhooks we’ve been on since 2007. She’s been summarily fired from her first job as executive secretary to a miner, so the ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn’t any of the qualifications the lumberman is looking for in a secretary, Mary tells her not to fret. “‘You thought you couldn’t learn mining,’ Mary told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to divide everything by twelve.’?”
As she makes her way to work each morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: “Now I grew more and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the battlefield and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread.”
Her employer’s business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she shouldn’t leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to stay until the end. “And I did,” we read, “in spite of Mr. Chalmers’ telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking they were as good as people like him.” Again, this blame-the-victim language recalls some of the rhetoric of today’s subprime mortgage crisis. But despite the boss’s efforts to draw a sociological line in the sand, he too is laid low by the economic downturn, and the chapter comes to an abrupt end: “Lumber was over.”
The author and her family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat. Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: “There is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to. You have to adjust to the fact that it’s no longer a question of what you eat but if you eat.”
But sometimes the details tell the story that the tone masks. When the heat and the electricity have been turned off, the family relies upon old Christmas candles for light and firewood for heat: “When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took turns sawing up fallen logs.” Here, despite the characteristic pluck, you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire.
This isn’t an overlay of social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative. Instead, such commentary is tightly knitted to MacDonald’s own experience. When she notices that “[e]very day found a little better class of people selling apples on street corners,” she’s not making an idle observation—she’s wondering if she’s next.
When I came to write my own memoir, I was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect parenting. In Betty MacDonald’s writing, I once again found just the model I needed. It was possible to connect the larger story around me to my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical. In fact, the more I focused on the details of my own very particular experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam in.
The message that Betty Macdonald sent me, through this book, is one of sufficiency: Your small life is enough. Other writers might be looking for a message that will feed their huge ambitions. From books, they learn how far they might go with their own writing. For me, the question has always been: How close to home might I stay?
MacDonald’s qualities as a writer—the focus on the very local, the self-deprecating humor, the careful and personal observation of social changes—are modest qualities. They inspire through their very humility. The homely, says Betty MacDonald, is more than enough. This was the message I needed to hear. There’s a clue, of course, right there in the title. It’s been telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you.
Such lack of pretension doesn’t necessarily come with great rewards. There are no monuments to Betty MacDonald. No endowed chairs, no scholarships, not even a public library conference room named after her. But in the shallow green bowl of Chimacum Valley, a two-lane road leads to the chicken farm where MacDonald lived for four tough years. It’s been renamed “The Egg and I Road.” It veers west from Route 19, cutting through farmland before heading up a hill into some evergreens. It’s nothing special. It’s just ordinary. It’s just a county road.
Don't miss this very special book, please.
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Hillary Clinton has pneumonia, doctor says, after early 9/11 event exit
Updated 1403 GMT (2203 HKT) September 12, 2016
Story highlights
- Hillary Clinton left the 9/11 ceremony early
- Her campaign said she was feeling overheated
(CNN)Hillary
Clinton has pneumonia, her doctor said Sunday, hours after the
Democratic nominee stumbled and exited a 9/11 commemoration ceremony
early.
The incident seems
certain to prompt further scrutiny of Clinton's health and her
campaign's transparency -- though Republican rival Donald Trump was
uncharacteristically silent throughout a solemn day marking the 15th
anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
Clinton,
68, was diagnosed on Friday with pneumonia, and "was put on
antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule," Dr. Lisa
Bardack said in a statement.
"While
at this morning's event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have
just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely,"
said Bardack, chairman of internal medicine at the Mount Kisco Medical
Group.
Bardack attended to Clinton at her Chappaqua home Sunday.
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton "continues to feel better" Monday morning.
The
Clinton campaign declined to answer questions Sunday about why her
diagnosis wasn't disclosed Friday. Many people even inside the Clinton
campaign did not know about the pneumonia diagnosis Friday. An aide said
that Clinton "thought she could push through this ... she was feeling
better" -- until Sunday morning.
The
episode quickly impacted Clinton's campaign. Late Sunday night a
campaign spokesman said a Clinton trip to California was being scrubbed,
including several high-dollar fundraisers and television appearances by
the candidate. Clinton donors who had planned to attend the San
Francisco fundraiser Monday were told by the campaign that the event
would go on as scheduled and that attendees could expect to hear from
the candidate "via teleconference."
Instead
Clinton now plans to stay home and prepare for the upcoming debates,
while her advisers to discuss how to move beyond arguably the worst
weekend of the campaign.
Two
people close to the campaign said Monday that Clinton will almost
certainly have to release more medical records -- or do an interview on
her health, specifically. She is likely to resume campaigning Wednesday,
but will almost certainly not fly to Nevada, as originally planned. She
is more likely to give her economic-themed speech in a battleground
state far closer to New York: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Ohio are
possibles.
Clinton's health came
into sharp focus Sunday as she appeared wobbly and stumbled as Secret
Service agents helped her into a van to exit a memorial service marking
the 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Democratic
nominee traveled to her daughter's nearby apartment and the campaign
initially said she felt "overheated."
A video of Clinton's
departure from the 9/11 event at Ground Zero in Manhattan, posted by
Twitter user Zdenek Gazda, shows her clearly stumbling, with Secret
Service agents helping her into the van in the motorcade.
Clinton
appeared to faint as she was leaving the Ground Zero ceremony, two law
enforcement officials -- including one who witnessed the incident --
told CNN.
Leaving her daughter's apartment a little before noon, Clinton told reporters she was "feeling great."
"It's
a beautiful day in New York," she added, while smiling and waving to
supporters on the street before getting into her motorcade.
On Sunday night campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said a planned California campaign trip Monday and Tuesday has been scrubbed.
Other incidents
Clinton
suffered a two-minute coughing fit during an event in Cleveland last
week, which she blamed on allergies -- and wryly put on the shoulders of
GOP nominee Donald Trump.
"Every time I think about Trump I get allergic," she joked in front of the crowd.
Trump
and his top surrogates have claimed that she faces a health crisis,
citing selectively edited videos of public events to advance claims
she's suffered seizures.
There is
no credible evidence to support any of these claims. Clinton's physician
-- the only person to speak on the record who has actually examined her
-- has repeatedly affirmed the former secretary of state's health and
fitness for the highest office in the land.
In
an interview on "Fox News Sunday" in August, former New York City mayor
and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani first accused the mainstream media of
hiding evidence, then encouraged doubters to "go online and put down
'Hillary Clinton illness.' "
During an appearance last month on the Jimmy Kimmel show, Clinton called the GOP claims about her health a "wacky strategy."
"I
don't know why they are saying this," she said. "I think on the one
hand, it is part of the wacky strategy, just say all these crazy things
and maybe you can get some people to believe you."
Trump camp muted
Trump
responded to the incident for the first time on Monday morning, but his
initial comments were relatively muted for the Republican nominee who
has repeatedly brought up Clinton's health and stamina on the campaign
trail.
"I really just don't know. I
hope she gets well soon," Trump told Fox News in an interview when
asked about the incident, adding later, "Something is going on but I
just hope she gets well and gets back on the trail, and we'll be seeing
her at the debate." Trump also said he would be releasing to the public
results from a doctor's physical he received last week.
Throughout
Sunday Trump and surrogates were quiet about Clinton's health. Sources
involved in Trump's campaign said they want to be respectful about the
health of his Democratic rival.
One said the campaign's message was to wish Clinton well and hope she gets the necessary medical care.
Another
source said surrogates have been instructed to be respectful and not to
post on social media about Clinton's health incident.
Separately
someone familiar with the situation said staff was instructed to keep
quiet and not post anything negative on social media about the issue --
with termination a potential consequence for doing so.
Trump
himself has not tweeted about Clinton's health Sunday, and this
afternoon while he visited a firehouse he refused to comment on her
health. "I don't know anything about it, don't know anything about it,"
he told reporters.
Trump's running
mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, refused to acknowledge reporters'
questions Sunday about Clinton and her health at an awards ceremony that
he presided over in Indianapolis.
Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein issued a statement Monday wishing Clinton the best.
"In
this extraordinary campaign cycle, where the stakes are so high and the
media can be merciless, it can be easy to forget that presidential
candidates are human beings too," Stein said.
Health history
The
most recent major health problem Clinton has suffered was a scare in
2012 following a concussion that resulted from a fainting spell -- but
she is in good health now, according to a statement from her doctor that
Clinton's campaign released in July 2015.
"Mrs.
Clinton is a healthy 67-year old female whose current medical
conditions include hypothyroidiam and seasonal pollen allergies," wrote
Dr. Lisa Bardack, Clinton's doctor since 2001, in a health statement
provided by Clinton's campaign.
The
health statement says the blood clot, also known as a thrombosis, that
Clinton suffered between her brain and skull following a fainting spell
and concussion in late 2012 is completely resolved.
Angelique Kerber, With a U.S. Open Win, Solidifies Her Claim on No. 1 Status
The line can be so fine, even with all the work Angelique Kerber has done on herself and her game.
And as she hoisted her second Grand Slam singles trophy of the year (and of her career) on Saturday at the United States Open, it seemed appropriate to wind back the tape eight months to the Australian Open.
In
the first round there, she faced a match point in the second-set
tiebreaker against the unseeded Misaki Doi of Japan and escaped only
when Doi’s shot hit the tape and fell back on Doi’s side of the net.
“What
would happen had she not won that match point?” Mary Joe Fernandez, the
United States Fed Cup captain, asked on Saturday, shortly before Kerber
went out and played her latest remarkable match under major pressure to
defeat the 10th-seeded Karolina Pliskova, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, in the Open
final.
Lose
to Doi in January, and Kerber would not have gone on to win her first
major title at the Australian Open, where she beat Serena Williams in a
three-set thriller. Lose to Doi in January, and Kerber might never have
found the state of mind necessary to experience this remarkable
midcareer renaissance at 28.
Such
tiny margins can have such big consequences. But the results were there
for all to see down the stretch on Saturday in Arthur Ashe Stadium as
Kerber, the No. 2 seed, won a very fine match in style, rallying from a
break of serve down in the third set to defeat an opponent who had
overpowered her, 6-3, 6-1, in the Cincinnati final just last month.
“You
saw it in the match,” Kerber’s coach, Torben Beltz, said of the changes
in his pupil. “If she’s a break down, she never gives up. I think she
never gives up. She’s the fighter she was before, but right now she
believes more in herself. You really see that she doesn’t want to lose
and wants to go for her shots. She has more self-confidence, and that’s
very important for her.”
Already
guaranteed to become No. 1 in the world this week for the first time,
Kerber will ascend to the top spot as a first-time United States Open
champion as well. After she had finished off her victory, reached up to
embrace the 6-foot-1 Pliskova and then climbed up to hug Beltz and
others in the players’ box, she descended to her courtside chair, put a
towel to her face and sobbed at length.
“It
was everything, I think, because of all the pressure in the last few
months,” Kerber said. “To win here is very special for me. Everything
starts for me here in 2011. This Grand Slam is really, really special.”
In
2011, Kerber arrived in New York with a world ranking of 92 and made a
most unexpected run to the semifinals before losing to the eventual
champion, Sam Stosur, in three sets. Though she had considerable success
in the seasons that followed, breaking into the top 10, she never
managed until this year to break through to that same stage of a Grand
Slam tournament.
Now
she has won two major titles and reached this year’s Wimbledon final,
where she lost to Williams, and she also secured a silver medal in
singles at the Summer Olympics last month.
It
all adds up to a phenomenal and unexpected season and further proof
that it is possible to make a breakthrough at an advanced tennis age.
The most recent previous example: Flavia Pennetta, who won her first
major singles title at the United States Open last year at 33.
Pennetta, an effervescent Italian, has since retired, but Kerber has every intention of continuing to ride her wave.
Always
a great defender and counterpuncher with a capacity to hit the
crowd-pleasing shot, Kerber has made her big move by getting fitter and
even quicker, by attacking with more frequency and by making subtle
improvements to her still vulnerable serve.
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She
won 51 percent of her second-serve points at the Open and 53 percent
against Pliskova despite Pliskova’s best efforts to attack on her
returns.
Kerber
will be the oldest player in the history of the WTA rankings to become
No. 1 for the first time. She is the first German woman to win the
United States Open since Steffi Graf, Kerber’s childhood idol and
occasional mentor, in 1996.
Graf
sent her a good-luck text before the match, which at 2 hours 7 minutes
turned out to be as grueling as it was entertaining. It was hot (close
to 90 degrees) and muggy (63 percent humidity), but Kerber and Pliskova,
both first-time Open finalists, kept hustling and taking chances right
through the tape.
In
the end, Kerber won it with great defense, tracking down Pliskova’s big
power in the corners. She won it by being steadier (she made 17
unforced errors to Pliskova’s 47). She won it with clever, sliced
left-handed serves at the right moments. But above all, she won it by
going for it.
“She’s
grown as a player,” Fernandez said. “She’s improved. She doesn’t just
play defense anymore. She plays aggressively. I think her forehand down
the line is one of the best in the game. She threads the needle
beautifully.”
She
proved quite the seamstress again at 3-3, 30-all in the final set with
Pliskova still pressing her. Pliskova hit a deep backhand crosscourt. It
was not an obvious opportunity, but Kerber chose to seize it anyway.
She went airborne and nailed a forehand down the line.
It
landed in the corner for a winner, and Kerber, eyes wide, pumped both
fists and went back to the increasingly familiar business of winning
Grand Slam titles — of staying on the right side of that very fine line
between contender and champion.
Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting.
Dearst
Rita Kocher und Wolfgang Hampel Congratulations!!!!
Happy Birthday Vita
Magica and all the best for the future!
All our love and best wishes
from Linde, Astrid and Lund family
Mr. Tigerli in China
Copyright 2016 by Letizia Mancino translation by Mary Holmes All rights reserved
Yes Betty, either or it seems he wanted to fly only with
Singapore Airways.
Boeing or Airbus, it’s just the same
isn’t it? Aren’t they both just fat birds with 500 passengers?
Yes, but Singapore Airlines has the
most beautiful airhostesses: delicate, fine, graceful… Mr. Tigerli had looked forward to the flight
so much!
So the little man was disappointed?
You just can’t imagine how disappointed
he was.
But thank God one of the hostesses was a
pretty Chinese girl. Mr. Tigerli purred loudly but she didn’t hear him because
the purring of the Airbus 380 was even louder.
The poor cat!
You’ve said it Betty. Mr. Tigerli was
in a very bad mood and asked me for a loud speaker.
I’m sure you can get one in 1st
Class.
“”Russian Girl” had even heard you over
the roar of the Niagara Falls” I said to Mr. Tigerli. “You are a very
unfaithful cat. You wanted to get to know Asiatic girls. That’s how it is when
one leaves one’s first love”.
And what did he say to that?
“Men are hunters” was his answer.
Yes, my dear cat, a mouse hunter. And
what else did he say?
Not another word. He behaved as if he
hadn’t heard me.
The Airbus is very loud.
I told him shortly “Don’t trouble
yourself about “Chinese Girl”. There will be enough even prettier girls in
China. Wait till we land in Guilin”.
Did he understand you?
Naturally Mr. Tigerli understood me
immediately. Yes, sweetheart, don’t worry. They will find you something sweet
to eat.
And he?
He was so happy.
No problem going through the immigration
control?
Naturally! Lots of problems. How could I explain to
customs that the cat had come as a tourist to China to buy shoes?
Fur in exchange for shoes…
Don’t be so cynical Betty!
Cat meat in exchange for shoes?
He came through the pass control with no trouble!
Is this Mr. Tigerli?
 |
Betty MacDonald's Vashon Island is a paradise.
info to: Sandra Lorinda Traci Petr Dana Jana Michaela Rebekah Swiss Charrd Tru John Darsie Darsie Toby Jeanine Carol Justin Lila Daniel Mo Nika Steve Neal Jitka Jitka Tami Pete Laurie Maia Nancy Kelly Pam Mary Jan and all our other friends
www.bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/
info to: Sandra Lorinda Traci Petr Dana Jana Michaela Rebekah Swiss Charrd Tru John Darsie Darsie Toby Jeanine Carol Justin Lila Daniel Mo Nika Steve Neal Jitka Jitka Tami Pete Laurie Maia Nancy Kelly Pam Mary Jan and all our other friends
www.bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/
Take an illustrated day trip through Washington state’s largest city with artist Candace Rose Rardon.
gadventures.com
Linda White yes,if my health allows.I have a few problems but is something I have always wanted to do,especially as I reread her books.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · August 1 at 6:37pm
Linde Lund Dear Linda I'll keep you posted.
Like · Reply · 1 · August 1 at 6:42pm
Bella Dillon · Friends with Darsie Beck
I still read Mrs Piggle Wiggle books to this day. I love her farm on vashon.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · August 1 at 10:32pm
Lila Taylor Good morning...Linde Lund
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 18 hrs
