March 27, 2008
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Two Million Happy Birthdays
Today the birthday of the woman who wrote “Happy Birthday to You,” Patty Smith Hill, an elementary teacher who was born in Anchorage, Kentucky, in 1868. We’d play her song for her, but she’s dead.
This song earns about two MILLION dollars a year in royalties which are split amongst AOL Time Warner, The Hill Foundation (a charity), and Patty’s nephew. (If you want the whole story, go HERE.)
And since we are on the subject, happy birthday tomorrow to Bethany and Saturday to Ghosty!
While we are on the subject of dead people, it was Robert Frost’s birthday on the 26th. I always picture Frost as a happy sort of poet with all his Birches and Apple Picking and Snowy Woods. But, all those nice rhymes hid a lot of suffering (or perhaps the suffering shaped the rhymes?). The Writer’s Almanac yesterday gave this report on Frost:
His first son died from cholera at age three; Frost blamed himself for not calling a doctor earlier and believed that God was punishing him for it. His health declined, and his wife became depressed. In 1907, they had a daughter who died three days after birth, and a few years later Elinor had a miscarriage. Within a couple years, his sister Jeanie died in a mental hospital, and his daughter Marjorie, of whom he was extremely fond, was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Marjorie died a slow death after getting married and giving birth, and a few years later, Frost’s wife died from heart failure. His adult son, Carol, had become increasingly distraught, and Frost went to visit him and to talk him out of suicide. Thinking the crisis had passed, he returned home, and shortly afterward his son shot himself. He also had to commit his daughter Irma to a mental hospital.
Yikes! Makes getting stuck in traffic with a dead cell phone battery and missing an appointment not seem so miserable, eh?
Comments (8)
omg! that is horrible and terrifying! Mental illness really scares me.
Too bad that it often takes someone else’s misery to make us realize that our inconveniences aren’t that bad after all, eeh?
Happy Birthday, Patty!
I had to page down a bit to find The Haircut and may I say, “Oh, wow!” That’s a fantastic look on you!
I’m convinced that suffering is the production manager of most great art. Maybe it’s a form of redemption built into a fallen creation.
How depressing! Did he have any children who survivied and thrived? What do you think was going on… ever hear of pyroluria?
And I did not mean porphyria, but ever hear of that?
I’ve been reading those newspapers I talk about occasionally on my blog, and there’s been an epidemic of diptheria going on in 1880-81. Just yesterday I read about a family with seven children, who over a few weeks time lost five of those children to diptheria. I don’t know if this is the same thing going on with my great-great grandparents in Elk County, PA, but they lost three children over the space of a couple of weeks in june of either 1880 or 1881 (the family Bible says one thing and the tombstone gives the other year) My great-grandfather was born after that.
@mamaglop -
porphyria, yes. That’s what King George III had, right? The other, no. Will Google!