I'm all about Valentines Day (Year Round Though)
Great Romances
The Trumans
Bess lived in her family home in Independence, Missouri. Harry was a hard-working farmer from Grandview, twenty miles away. So he courted her, in part, by mail. Their correspondence would continue for nearly fifty years -- an exciting ride through nine years of courtship, fifty-three years of marriage, family, career changes, and political fortunes that thrust them to the very center of the world stage. More than 1300 letters from Harry to Bess Truman survive in the Truman Library collections.
Sadly, most of her letters to him have been lost to history. After showering Bess with attention and letters for more than a year, Harry proposed to her in 1911, but she turned him down. He persisted, and eventually she fell in love with him. He had a standing invitation to dinner at the Wallace home on Sundays, often sleeping across the street, afterwards, on the floor of his cousins' house because travel between Grandview and Independence was arduous. To win her favor -- she was from a wealthy family -- and better his prospects, he entered into a series of business ventures -- mining, drilling for oil, and other speculations -- most ending in disappointment. Although he also served as Grandview postmaster and as a county road overseer, his future remained uncertain.
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The Brownings
On January 10, 1845, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett for the first time, after reading her volume of poetry, Poems. He was a little-known thirty-two-year-old poet and playwright, she was an internationally renowned poet, an invalid, and a thirty-nine-year-old spinster. "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett -- I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart," the letter said. Over the course of the next twenty months, they would write each other close to six hundred letters -- one of the greatest literary correspondences of all time.
The pair's last letter was exchanged on September 18, 1846, the night before the two left for a trip to Italy, and two weeks after their secret marriage. Their romance, which she would eventually credit with saving her life, lasted for fifteen years and spawned some of the world's most beautiful poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the daughter of Mary Moulton Barrett and Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, an extremely wealthy landowner who owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. Her mother died when Elizabeth was just twenty-one, after having given birth to twelve children. Although Elizabeth, the eldest, was probably her father's favorite child, she struggled along with her siblings under his tyrannical parenting. Incredibly controlling, Mr. Barrett insisted that none of his children marry, baffling even the family's closest friends.
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aining, for the minor league Montreal Royals, in Daytona Beach, Florida -- the deep south, a bastion of hard-core racism. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Rachel Robinson later recalled, "That first spring training was like a nightmare. There was so much degradation. There was bigotry like we had never encountered." But Jackie, with Rachel at his side, endured the indignities of the training trip and a season filled with countless insults, threats, and bean balls on his way to leading the league in batting, runs scored, and fielding. The next spring, despite a threatened boycott by the club's players, the Brooklyn Dodgers promoted Robinson to the major league -- seven years before the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling integrated the country's schools.
posted by a faith bigger than fear at Wednesday, February 14, 2007
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