On this Day…1895 Carol Ryrie Brink by Donna Schlachter

courtesy Wikipedia

Well, my year of blogging about writers in American history comes to a close with a more contemporary author, Carol Ryrie Brink. She wrote more than 30 juvenile and adult books, and her novel, Caddie Woodlawn, won the 1936 Newberry Medal and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958, attesting to the longevity of her books’ appeal.

Carol was born in Moscow, Idaho as Caroline Sybil Ryrie, the only child of Alexandre Ryrie and Henrietta Watkins. Her Scottish-born father also served as mayor of Moscow from 1895-1897. He died in 1900, and her mother remarried. Her step-father, Elisha Nathaniel Brown, failed, and her mother took her own life in 1904 at the age of 29, leaving Caroline to be raised by her widowed grandmother, Caroline Woodhouse Watkins. Carol later used her as a model for her character Caddie Woodlawn. Carol was inspired by her grandmother’s life and storytelling abilities, setting the stage for her future career. 

Carol's signature -- courtesy Wikipedia

 

 

Carol began writing for her school newspapers, continuing in college, where she graduated from the Portland Academy in Oregon before attending the University of Idaho in Moscow from 1914-1917. She wrote for both the college newspaper and the yearbook. In 1917, she transferred to the University of California in Berkeley for her senior year, graduated the following year.

Right after graduation, she married Raymond Brink, a mathematics professor she’d met in Moscow. He now taught at the University of Minnesota, and so Carol moved to St. Paul, where they lived for 42 years, raising a son David and a daughter Nora. They loved spending summers in the Wisconsin backwoods, and traveled often to Scotland and France.

Carol’s first novel, Anything Can Happen on the River, released in 1934. She continued writing fiction, publishing more than 30 books and two plays. And she added poetry and painting to her endeavors.

She was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Idaho in 1965, and Brink Hall, at that same university, contains the English department.

Raymond passed away in 1973 after 55 years of marriage, and Carol died eight years later in 1981 at the age of 85.

In 1995, on the centennial of her birth, the “Carol Ryrie Brink Nature Park” was dedicated. And, in the city’s north end, the refurbished Carnegie building of the city library contains the “Carol Ryrie Brink Reading Room” in the children’s area. Carol frequented that library as a child.

In her family, the oldest daughter has been named either Carol or Caroline for at least seven generations, continuing to the present.

Leaving a legacy to future generations is critical, and Carol surely has done her part.


Leave a comment about Carol Ryrie Brink and share your thoughts about her enduring legacy.




About Donna: 
A hybrid author, Donna writes squeaky clean historical and contemporary suspense. She has been published more than 60 times in books; is a member of several writers' groups; facilitates a critique group; teaches writing classes; and judges in writing contests. She loves history and research, traveling extensively for both, and is an avid oil painter. She is taking all the information she’s learned along the way about the writing and publishing process, and is coaching committed writers eager to tell their story.



www.DonnaSchlachter.com

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Resources: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ryrie_Brink

Thanksgiving Through the Years

 By Sherri Stewart

 

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, I thought it useful to consider how our modern-day traditions correspond to those of the first Thanksgiving and even the Thanksgivings of the first few centuries. It is easy to celebrate when everything is going well in one’s life, but if any of us have experienced losing a loved one before a major holiday, the word thanksgiving doesn’t flow so glibly off the tongue. Indeed, in that first Thanksgiving of 1621, only four women of the original eighteen who’d reached the new world survived to cook the three-day celebration for the remaining fifty men and children, and the Wampanoag. The disparity in numbers may have been due to the fact that the women had to remain on the Mayflower while the men went ashore to build shelters. Susan Hardman Moore. Yale Books. November 2014  

www.history.com

While Washington and Adams (the first two presidents) were in favor of celebrating the national holiday of Thanksgiving, Thomas Jefferson was adverse to the idea of the government legislating a national holiday. In his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, he said there should be a “Wall of Separation between the Church and State.” Note that this was in a letter, not in the Constitution, but because of a bigamy case, Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), the Supreme Court ruled that Jefferson’s letter should be used to interpret the First Amendment of the Constitution. For the next sixty years, Thanksgiving was relegated to the jurisdiction of the state or the colony.

www.monticello.org

It wasn’t until 1863 that Abraham Lincoln instituted Thanksgiving as a national holiday, in part because the president wanted to unify a country that was badly broken after the Civil War. He was also moved by an impassioned letter written to him by Sarah Josepha Hale, who was editor of Godey’s Lady Book, a ladies’ magazine. She also wrote, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Her lobbying effort to make Thanksgiving a national holiday can be traced back to a passage of her 1827 novel Northwood. “We have too few holidays,” she wrote. “Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be a national festival observed by all the people … as an exponent of our republican institutions.” Olivia B. Waxman. Time. Nov 2016

Although most Americans consume turkey on Thanksgiving Day, the first Thanksgiving in 1621 most likely featured deer or fowl (partridge, quail), due to the fact that chickens, turkeys, and cattle were not  slaughtered because of their ability to produce eggs and milk. Advertisements, menus, and cookbooks show that the traditional turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie meal hasn’t changed much since the early part of the twentieth century.

whatcomtalk.com

Many of the origins of Thanksgiving’s modern traditions may surprise the reader. While Thanksgiving may be a huge day for food consumption, it’s also the most popular day of the year to run in a race. “Turkey trots” have been around since 1896 when the Buffalo YMCA hosted their first holiday 8K. These days, more than 14,000 runners will run in turkey trots all over America. For those Thanksgiving revelers who prefer to play “armchair quarterback,” the first official Thanksgiving NFL game took place between the Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears in 1934, but playing football on this particular holiday can be traced back to 1869.  Although the dismal origins of Black Friday go back to 1869, only in the last decade have stores begun to open on Thanksgiving Day. Erin Johnson, MakeItGrateful.com So, what traditions do you keep with your family? Your answer, please.

peachridgeglass.com

Selah Award finalist Sherri Stewart loves a clean novel, sprinkled with romance and a strong message that challenges her faith. She spends her working hours with books—either editing others’ manuscripts or writing her own. Her passions are traveling to the settings of her books and sampling the food. She traveled to Zürich for Secrets Dark and Deep. A widow, Sherri lives in Orlando with her lazy dog, Lily. She shares recipes, tidbits of the book’s locations, and other authors' books in her newsletter.

Subscribe at stewartwriting.com/newsletter

An Uncommon Gift

Ella Davis’s papa always told her there’d be no class difference in Heaven, but Ella has years to live on God’s green earth until she reaches her reward. She’s content to be a maid on the Huntington Estate, as long as she has her books and her kitten. But when her ladyship, Amberly Huntington, coerces Ella to take her place on the Mauretania, the fastest ocean liner in 1910, Ella’s worst nightmare has come to pass. She must pretend to be nobility for the eight days it takes to reach New York. In other words, she must live a lie—and this just before Christmas! https://bit.ly/47MTvYX

Nazis’ Children—Part Two

Did the children of Nazi leaders approve of what their parents did? Did they adopt the beliefs of their parents after the truth became known, or did they denounce what their parents did? A common theme presents itself; namely, if the children had a close, loving relationship with their fathers, they were more inclined to adopt their parents’ belief system when they became adults, but if their relationship with their fathers was strained, they distanced themselves from their parents’ beliefs.

Hans Frank was the lawyer for Hitler and the Nazi party. Frank was also the governor general of Poland, known as the “Butcher of Poland.” He was arrested in May 1945 and hanged in 1946. His son, Niklas, was born in March 1939. The first time Niklas saw children his own age was when he was four years old. His mother had driven to the concentration camp in Krakow to buy corsets. “No one makes better corsets than the Jews in the ghetto,” she said. The children he saw were dressed in torn, soiled clothes, bones protruding from their impoverished bodies. After the war, he learned that his father had gassed two million Jews and immediately understood the evil his father had perpetrated. This understanding may have come because both his parents had been cold, distant, and violent. They called him “fremde,” which means “stranger.” Niklas became a journalist and the author of three books where he decried what his father had done. 

Getlen,Larry.www.nypost.com/2018/02/03

Martin Bormann was Adolf Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Nazis’ home office. He died ostensibly by suicide in May 1945. His body was identified in 1972. Martin Jr. was born to Gerda Bormann in April 1930. He was Hitler’s first godson. His father was very severe with Martin. Once when Martin Jr. saluted the Führer and said, “Heil Hitler,” his father slapped him, saying that he should have said, “Heil, mein Hitler.” Bormann was fifteen and living at a boarding school when the war ended in 1945. Fearing for his life, he fled, hiding out at a farm in Austria. A Christan farmer took him in and raised him as his own son. From his adoptive parents, he learned what his real parents had done. Martin Jr. never publicly denounced his father because he said it was God’s responsibility to judge him. Upon reaching adulthood, he joined a Jesuit seminary and was ordained a priest in 1958. In 1971, after being injured in an automobile accident, Martin Jr. woke up in a hospital, and over the next few weeks, he fell in love with a nurse, and they married. Until his death in 2013, he and his wife spent their lives as teachers of religion.

Rudolf Hess was the deputy führer under Hitler until 1941 when he was arrested in England after a botched rogue mission. He spent the rest of his life in an English prison until he committed suicide in 1987. His son, Wolf, was born to Ilse Hess in 1937. Wolf was only three years old when his father was arrested, but they communicated through letters until his father died. Rudolf even taught Wolf how to play chess through his letters. Wolf always believed his father was wrongly accused and that he didn’t commit suicide but rather was killed in prison. Wolf spent the rest of his life trying to exonerate his father and wrote three books about him. He died in 2001.

Almost eighty years have passed since the war ended, and most sons and daughters of Nazi leaders have passed away or are in the last years of their lives, but what about the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Nazi leaders? Many live in the United States, and none of them personally knew their grandparents. Bettina Goering and her brother, who were the great-niece and nephew of Hermann Goering, took drastic measures and sterilized themselves. Bettina said from her US home, “It’s easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance.” https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine.18120890.

Selah Award finalist Sherri Stewart loves a clean novel, sprinkled with romance and a strong message that challenges her faith. She spends her working hours with books—either editing others’ manuscripts or writing her own. Her passions are traveling to the settings of her books and sampling the food. She traveled to Zürich for Secrets Dark and Deep. A widow, Sherri lives in Orlando with her lazy dog, Lily. She shares recipes, tidbits of the book’s locations, and other authors' books in her newsletter.

Subscribe at stewartwriting.com/newsletter

An Uncommon Gift

Ella Davis’s papa always told her there’d be no class difference in Heaven, but Ella has years to live on God’s green earth until she reaches her reward. She’s content to be a maid on the Huntington Estate, as long as she has her books and her kitten. But when her ladyship, Amberly Huntington, coerces Ella to take her place on the Mauretania, the fastest ocean liner in 1910, Ella’s worst nightmare has come to pass. She must pretend to be nobility for the eight days it takes to reach New York. In other words, she must live a lie—and this just before Christmas! https://bit.ly/47MTvYX