Mount Holyoke College
South Hadley, MassachusettsDepartment of Physiology
With Mrs. Frank Bayley
1235 Eighth Avenue, East
Seattle, Washington.
October 2, 1940Dear Friends,
I have opened my typewriter and found nothing wrong except the presence of a large ad [sic] very black spider, source unknown. The typewriter has been on and off of a good many trains and boats since it left South Hadley, but the paper around it has endured to the end, and now Mollie (Mrs. Bayley) says she can give me a new one.
I am writing to several of you at once because there just is not time enough to write the letters I should like to. Most of you will know that I stopped off in Vancouver to see the trees in the park and to connect with Lucy Smith's husband, Wilbert Clemens, now professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia. He was beginning his first year the day I arrived so I tried to be tasteful and not connect with him until after his job was over for the day. He began right off with an all afternoon laboratory on protozoa. The daughter, Ann Morgan, came to the hotel after her classes were over and took me for a nice drive around the town, which is big and looks enterprising, and growing. We went along a lovely marine drive for one thing. It was a medium pleasant day though not clear enough for me to see the mountains. In fact I have seen no mountainssince the day I left Lake Louise and went through the handsome Selkirks. We ended our drive at the University where we picked up Dr. Clemens and then went to their new house which they had a hard time to find but which is very attractive and not too far from the university. It comes with lots of flowers in the garden. I think Ann must be less of an out-door girl than formerly for she was a nice little hostess and she is taking an interest in cooking. She is a university sophomore, knows the way around, therefore, must [sic] better than her father, and is distinctly attractive. They have a young housekeeper. I had dinner with them and in the evening Dr. Clemens and I talked of the ways of fishes. He knows so much about them from his years at Nanaimo, but I think he is glad to make the change because he was tired of so much detailed executive work. Ann now has her mind on a major in bacteriology and is getting her preliminary chemistry and biology with interest, I thought. She still takes an interest in coming to Mount Holyoke and has thought of perhaps taking a year of graduate work there, probably mostly in zoology, since we do not offer enough Bacteriology. The boy has spent two summers in hydrographic work on a government training ship and seemed to me a bit at a loss as to what next. I think he has not entered the university and his preparatory work - as so often happens - does not quite connet [sic] with his present ideas. Early in that day I went to the beig park to see the western trees. I got an amusing Scotchman to take me the seven miles around it in a car and he pretended to know the trees. He got a bit mixed in spots, but at least he knew some of them and they were just stunning. I'm so delighted with the Douglas firs and the cedars. I had not known the latter were so lovely, such beautiful sweeping foliage.
The trip across to Victoria was a total loss because it was so foggy, and I am sure it might have been fine. In Victoria I found that my good friend Mollie Bass (who belongs to the Wilton Bass family, Jessee [sic]) was already there. The gardens of that hotel, a O.P.R. one, were wonderfully beautiful and also the conservatory with many things I never saw before. In the forenoon of the next day we went some fifteen miles outside the city to the Butchart Gardens. A wealthy man has these acres and acres of gardens with all the flowers you can imagine beautifully laid out in all sorts of ways. Most of it is rather informal, nice walks and borders, but there are some sunken gardens in the pits from which the stuff was dug out which made the cement which gave him his money, there are lots of rock gardens, and indeed many different kinds of planting. I just never saw so many things in blossom at this time of year. I had not taken it in that they often have no winter at all out here, owing to the Japanese current, and so many things are hardy which we can not have at all. It is a moist climate so they do not get hot and dry in the summer, though there is a good deal of watering necessary at that season. The gardens are in their home estate and you go as close to the windows as to those of the Warbasses at Woods Hole, Charlotte. The only commercial thing about it is the sale of garden seeds. I bought two packages of things which looked as if they might grow with us and I hope I shall not forget to send them home at the right time.
The boat trip to Seattle was as disapointing as the previous one, but Frank met us in the evening, and since then I have been very happy in this lovely home. It is not ornate, but just infinitely comfortable and friendly. The weather has been very poor as weather goes, cludy, rainy, foggy, everything but clear. There has been some sun, and the best of it fortunately came on Sunday so we went out to the summer home on a neighboring island where they began to camp in tents some over thirty years ago. There are now four houses on their two acres all forested and a nice big new camp soing up for the daughter and her four girls. The oldest house will come down.
We just have nothing like such a place on our shore. The water is Puget Sound and more or less sheltered, but yet wide enough to give magnificent boating, and one of the things dear to Frank's heart all these years has been boats. They have no big ones now as his sons are building their own homes and busy getting their families and lives going. But I have seen the pictures of the champion boats which they have had as the boys were along college age. One son is a lawyer with his father, and the other is selling piles, prepared so as to resist the ravages of the teredo, a very bad problem on this coast. I judge they are both gettingn [sic] on well. The daughter after a sad time with a poor husband is now well-poised and happy with her teaching in the High School (English, though art is her chief interest) and her apartment and her four girls. The oldest is 16, the youngest 10, and it seems incredible that they can be so big when her junior year at Mount Holyoke feels to me so recent. They are a fine family, and Mollie has been just a wonderful person in this matter of bringing up her own family, her husband's sister's family, and now these several grandchildren, six in all. The other day the daughter in law brought in a sweet little boy to spend the day while she went shopping. Another youngster comes in for lunches on school days, Elizabeth's youngest, and Mollie is still very much in the business of taking care of children.
I have written Alma Stokey the details as far as I could remember them of that forest by the sea, and I just wish you all could go through the trails as I did, see the different trees, so big and so elegant in their lines, find the new shrubs and flowering plants, even if they are not in flower now. We went only a little way, for I do not walk much, but it was enough to get a fine sample and I saw a lot. I like the Douglas first and the cedars best of all. There is one fir on their land 250 feet tall or so. Its two companions had to come down a few years ago and Frank told me about the skill of the foresters in felling them, and of how far they went along the roadway into which they came. Our huge black-walnut was as nothing, though these do not have a great sweep of branches as it had.
Today is sunny at the moment and we are soon starting for lunch down town before I go to a hair-dresser. But it is not yet clear. I do hope so much to see Rainier before leaving and the western mountains. The latter are visible from the house here. The sun sets behind them - if we ever see it.
On last Saturday I made a speech before the Seattle Women's University Club, not a branch of the A.A.U.W. but including women from many institutions, and fine women. They have one of the nice club-houses whose atmosphere was most familiar. There may have been 50 - 60 present, and they paid good attention. I was glad to see a considerable number of Mount Holyoke women of all generations, one of Miss Smith's classmates perhaps the oldest. I remember when she came to visit Miss Smith in Faculty House, Miss Louise Ayers [sic]. One who was not there but who has called me up was Evelyn Gibson, now the wife of a man who is instructing in the naval department at the University. I hope to see her before I leave. Tonight I go out to dinner for the first time, with Helen Clapp Barnes, '09. She was at the party on Saturday. Tomorrow night the sons and their wives come to dinner - we had Betty abd [sic] her girls one day last week. On Thursday Mollie is inviting in the Mount Holyoke people I know for tea. She had some of her friends one other day. We try not to do more than one party on for Friday, a friend of Mollie's gives it, and I shall leave on Saturday for points south. Mollie will start on Sunday for the east, to see Genevieve, her cousin whose health is very poor. I hope she and Frank will both get to South Hadley. He has never been there - and every one would like him so much. I just do not see how he could be finer. Isn't it nice to have a few thoroughly satisfactory husbands in our acquaintance?
I expect to go to Portland for a few days. There is a little inn up the Columbia River which Frank and Mollie recommend and I may go there for a day or two if the weather is good. Then I go on to San Francisco. I have just had this morning a nice lteer [sic] from Frances Smith and shall probably stay with her for a week or so. Address from about October 11 to the 18th, let's say, In care of Miss Frances Curtis Smith 2510 Green Street, San Francisco, California. It is not yet possible to say whether there will be library reading at this stage or not. It may seem best to go to some pleasant place out in the country for a spell. Another plan which is in the offing is going to Tucson for a time in the winter to meet Mollie and Frank. They went there last winter and liked it a lot. Genevieve was on then but can not come this year. They plan to take the car this week. It is not so far from Los Angeles and vicinity. Wouldn't that be fine?
There will be lots of corrections as I go over these sheets, not all my fault because the machine sticks at several joints. I guess it will need a regular man when I get to San Francisco. Please forgive the errors. I'll write just a bit of a line at the end to each of you.
[Unsigned, but written by Abby H. Turner]