Contents:

• The Finest Victorian Restoration in the U.S.?
• Mississippi Solo discussions begin
• One Mother's Detective Work
• Tell us who should receive a Governor's Humanities Award
• An appreciation of Mississippi Solo by Nick Knight

Lethal Wealth: A Story Within a Family Story

I seem to be fixated on houses this spring. Yesterday's Post-Dispatch carried a feature on the restoration currently under way at the Campbell House Museum at 1508 Locust Street in St. Louis. The Director of the museum is John Dalzell, a former board member of the Missouri Humanities Council and my co-captain in the "charettes" I organize for three or four Missouri institutions every year.

The Campbell House project promises to be one of the finest Victorian-era restorations in the U.S. You can check Patricia Corrigan's story by pointing your browser to http://www.stltoday.com/ and typing "Campbell House" in the "site search" box.

I was fortunate to have a tour of the house last Saturday morning with my friend, David Watkins, who had come here from Cornell University to consult with me and six other people for two days at the charette I conducted for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum. (By the way, the April 2004 issue of Missouri Life has a great feature on the Wilder home. This is one of the best "commercial" humanities magazines I know about!)

Back to the Campbell House. John Dalzell has to be one of the liveliest minds I've ever known. He seems to be interested in everything connected with the museum life, especially the stories. John's many tales of the Campbell House restoration prompted my visit with David. I've created a Campbell House mini-magazine piece with the pictures I took there on Saturday.

Robert Campbell was a very successful businessman. His family lived in the lap of luxury. Ironically, their wealth doomed most of them, as Dalzell tells the story. They were able to afford lead water pipes, which set them several cuts above the rest of the city's residents, and they got "city water," which was piped directly to their home from the Mississippi River. This luxury proved lethal. The long-term effects of the lead were compounded by the short-term effects of their ignorance about drinking contaminated water. Sure, they poured it into two-gallon glass jars to allow the sediments to sink to the bottom before using the "clarified" remainder, but that didn't spare the children. In all, Virginia Campbell, who apparently was continuously pregnant for about twenty years, saw only three of her thirteen children survive beyond the age of seven, and one of them suffered from a mental disorder in adulthood.

The house is open from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and noon to 4:00 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $4 for adults. Children 12 and under are admitted free. For more information call (314) 421-0325. Their very good web site is at http://stlouis.missouri.org/501c/chm/index.html

Mississippi Solo Discussions Begin

Hats off to Missouri librarians. A group of them got the idea to create a state-wide opportunity once a year for people to read and discuss the same book. Two years ago they read Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir of the experience of West-coast Japanese-American families' forced relocation to guarded camps in the desert during World War II. Last year people read Paulette Jiles's novel of the hardships of the Civil War in southeast Missouri, Enemy Women. The selection of that book created quite a stir in historical circles, and for a while I refused to read it because I was persuaded by several historians in Ripley County that the author had blurred an important distinction between fact and fiction in writing historical novels. However, I later relented and enjoyed that book a great deal, though I am still troubled by the ease with which a reader will surmise that a fictitious massacre and some related fictions are historical facts.

This year we're reading Mississippi Solo, a journal of a "river journey" to commemorate the Lewis and Clark expedition. However, this journey is contemporary, and the man in the boat has zero experience with the outdoor life. He takes borrowed camping gear and a borrowed canoe and puts into the water at the top of the Mississippi River in the month of October and begins to learn to navigate on his own. The author of this delightful tale is Eddy L. Harris. He's touring Missouri in connection with the ReadMOre project, and we've got a web page with schedule information. Even if you can't get to a discussion, I hope you'll join all the members of the Missouri Humanities Council board and staff in reading this book!

By the way, if you're coordinating a book discussion on Mississippi Solo or know about one taking place, please let us know so that we may include it on our activity calendar.

http://www.mohumanities.org/programs/readmore/2005.htm

One Mother's Detective Work

We have so many pigeon holes to make it easy to disregard people. "Low-income" is one. "Teen mom" is another. Here's a detective story with a low-income, single, teen mom as the heroine. Let's call her "Penny" because she's a low-income single teen mom.

Penny wanted to do the right thing for her baby, so she joined one of our READ from the START discussion groups to find out about reading to children. She learned all sorts of things about talking to your baby, about making up games to go with the books, and about the layers of meaning that lie within even a simple story.

During a session on one of my favorites (Mouse Count by Ellen Stoll Walsh), the discussion leader challenged those in attendance to try to figure out a mystery that lies just outside the boundary of the story. (This is a book that is all about boundaries, not just about counting!)

The dedication page says the following:
For my nine sisters and brothers:
Sally, Leila, Mary, Nancy, Jane, Betsy, Joe, George, and John,

and especially for Sally, the eldest,
and her husband, Jay,
intrepid seekers after truth.

GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE
BODHI SWAHA!

Our young detective, "Penny," searched the internet and discovered information about "sutras" and "mantras" and recordings of Tibetan Buddhist monks. She found that this phrase is a "mantra" that comes at the end of the Buddhist "Heart Sutra." She brought the results of her research back to the group.

The mantra is the concluding passage of a story of Kwan Yin, a Chinese "bodhisattva" (enlightened one) associated with compassion. The first word is pronounced, "GAH-tay." The mantra expresses the hope that all beings will transcend the illusions of ordinary experience and come to a state of enlightenment. "Swaha" is an exclamation of affirmation to conclude an important concept. In general translation, the words mean, "Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, Hallelujah!" This translation is found at http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/articles/interbeing.htm

Tell Us Who Deserves a Governor's Humanities Award

We call on our readers again to nominate people for the 2004 Governor's Awards in the Humanities. Each year in October Missouri's Governor recognizes exemplary teachers, writers, and others who have made outstanding contributions to a community's understanding of its heritage. The deadline for nominations is June 3.

We had a wonderful group of nominees last year. Won't you help us recognize the best of Missouri's teachers, the best authors, and the best of the people who toil year after year to make their museum, their library, or their historical society the pride and joy of the region? Information and forms for making a nomination are at this web page:
http://www.mohumanities.org/award.htm

An Appreciation of Mississippi Solo

Our board's chair, Nick Knight, penned an appreciation of this year's ReadMOre book, which I've included in our printed newsletter and will share with our e-mail readers here. Next month I'll tell you about Nick's gift to the Rolla community. He's doing thirty brown-bag lectures on the plays of Shakespeare to commemorate his thirty years at UMR!

--Michael Bouman