BETTY: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I by Wellman Anne

Author:Wellman, Anne [Wellman, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: biography, non-fiction
Published: 2016-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Betty and the Island

THE NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION where Betty had found a job was another New Deal agency set up to provide work and education for young people. The Depression had brought special hardship to young Americans, preventing many from finishing school or entering the labor market, and denying them the opportunity to attain or improve skills. The NYA was a pet project of President Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor, who had greatly feared losing the younger generation through lack of education and unemployment. Some 2.8 million young people were on relief in the mid 1930s and the organization was dedicated to helping those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five either to stay in school or to obtain training and work experience. There were two streams at the NYA: the student work program enabling young people to remain in school or college, and the out-of-school employment program for those over sixteen. Participants in the programs received on-the-job training in construction, metal and woodworking, office work, recreation, and health care. Young NYA workers also performed useful work in parks, national forests, and other outdoor recreational areas.

Betty had a variety of tasks at the NYA and was ultimately appointed head of its Division of Information in Seattle. She seems to have loved what she did there. She worked on brochures, publicity releases and in-house magazines and read young writers’ manuscripts – an outlet at last for her creativity and writing skills. At any one time Betty had between forty and ninety-five youth workers to supervise on projects as various as silkscreen printing and Youth Orchestra try-outs (during which she met, and cooked lunch for, conductor Leopold Stokowski). She stayed there for the next three years and only left when the NYA was eventually dissolved in 1943.

It was during this period that Betty met the well-known painter William Cumming through her friendship with the writer and journalist Margaret Bundy Callahan, the former editor of Town Crier magazine which had published Betty’s short story in 1933. Margaret was at the center of a coterie of artists and writers and it was at Margaret’s one evening that Betty was introduced to Bill Cummings. Bill was a member of what became known as the Northwest School, painters interested in exploring the light and color of the Puget Sound area with an aesthetic much influenced by Japanese art. He was a significant voice in the development of the School, which was the first widely recognized artistic movement of the region. Always an eccentric, Bill would later call himself the ‘Willie Nelson of Northwest Painting’. He too had written for the Town Crier and had an interesting way with words. In the inimitable style of his memoir he gives us a very vivid portrait of Betty at this period of her life:

One Callahan evening in particular was rendered riotous by the febrile chatter and staccato laugh of a frenetic young woman whose hair stands in memory as being on fire, a manifest absurdity occasioned by its hue of reddish gold.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.