In Praise of Nurses, Again. (And Always)
A post in praise of nurses during National Nurses Week, which runs from May 6 through May 12 * here in the United States, has become a tradition here on the Margins.
Like many of the best traditions, it happened almost without my noticing it. In the months after Heroines of Mercy Street was published, in 2016, I found myself talking to nurses–and their friends, mothers, daughters, granddaughters and nieces. (And occasionally their fathers, sons, grandsons and nephews.) The experience confirmed my long-held opinion that nurses rock. When National Nurse Week appeared on my radar, I knew I needed to celebrate.
After the year we’ve been through, I think it’s even more important to recognize nurses for the important, sometimes dangerous work they do. In honor of the nurses I know, and the nurses I don’t, here are links to a series of posts from 2016 about Clara Barton, the first nurse to catch my imagination:
Clara Barton: Nursing Outside the Box
Clara Barton, Act II: Finding the Missing
Clara Barton, Act III: The American Red Cross
If you run into a nurse this week, say thank you for a hard job done well.
*Florence Nightingale’s birthday.
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And speaking of birthdays: History in the Margins turns ten next week. I’m putting together a list of ten of the posts that people have enjoyed the most. Back in March, I asked you to share any posts that you particularly remember for inclusion on this list. I still have a couple of spots left. If there is a post you’d like to nominate, let me know by Sunday, May 9, at 5:00 pm, Central time.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Long Before Textspeak, There was Cablese
One of the things foreign correspondents juggled in the days before the internet rendered long-distance charges meaningless was the eternal trade-off between time and money in turning in a story. The mail was slow and (relatively) cheap. Cables and telephones* were fast and expensive. Reporters were torn between the desire to scoop other papers on big stories and the desire not to have their editors harp at them about their monthly cable bill.
If a reporter sent in a “mailer,” she had room to expand on a topic, fill in background, even play with language. But cables were paid for by the word, with an upper limit on how many characters counted as a word. As a result, foreign correspondents needed to send stories by cable to their editors back home using the fewest possible characters. The result was cablese: a funky shorthand in which reporters used special symbols and abbreviations, condensed some words, and left others out altogether, leaving the cable editor at the home office to put the stories back into plain English. “Untreaty smorning” became “no treaty agreed upon this morning” in the hands of a skilled cable editor. (These went the other way as well in the case of newspapers like the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, where reporters on the copy desk created columns for the paper from a fifty word dispatch of cablese from the home office.)
Every news agency had its own list of codes so they wouldn’t get scooped, but some techniques were common to them all. A creative use of prefixes was popular: exGermany appears frequently in Sigrid Schultz’s cables home. Words couldn’t simply be run together: canny wire operators would recognize that as a an attempt to game the system. But reversing a phrase was fair game: uplook for look up, downhold for hold down, onworking for working on.** There is a story that an editor sent British writer Evelyn Waugh*** an assignment to investigate reports that a British nurse had been killed in an air raid. The cable red SEND TWO HUNDRED WORDS UPBLOWN NURSE. Waugh found the rumors were not true and replied NURSE UNUPBLOWN.
Most of the examples I’ve seen don’t feature that degree of flair. Here’s a pretty straightforward example from Sigrid Schultz’s correspondence: Thank u v much for letter of Oct 31 clears up the matter v satisfactorily since u assure me that u r not askg G office new information or cards issued f reporting purposes.
LOL?
*Sometimes used in combination in the period I am dealing with in a effort to get the best balance. A reporter in Berlin would call in a story to a central office in Paris or London, from whence it would be cabled to New York, and then on the other hubs.
**Spellcheck hates these and suggests upload, download, and non-working as replacements.
***He was a journalist as well as a satirical novelist and used his own experience of covering a foreign war to great affect in Scoop.
Celebrating Independent Bookstore Day, Virtually
Today is Independent Bookstore Day in the United States, assuming you are reading this on the day it comes out. (And it really doesn’t matter if you’re not. All the important bits still apply.)
Last year I was too heartsore/stunned/scared to post my usual love letter to independent bookstores. My beloved Seminary Coop Bookstore and its little sister 57th Street Books had temporarily closed their doors and were just beginning to figure out how to work through the pandemic. I had enough books on hand to keep me reading for the foreseeable future.* But I worried that brick-and-mortar bookstores would not survive.
A year later, my independent bookstore is still functioning, thanks to a combination of mail delivery, curbside service, and in-person delivery for those of us who live in the neighborhood. I’ve been an enthusiastic user of the in-person delivery option. In fact, I may have gotten a little carried away. Yesterday my book-delivering bookseller, on his second visit of the week, greeted me with a cheerful, “More books!” when he handed me my packages.
In the past, I’ve celebrated Independent Bookstore Day in person, armed with a wish list and an eye for the serendipitous find. This year, I plan to order another book or five and dream of the day when I can go back to the bookstore in real life. I can’t wait!
*(Who am I kidding? I have enough books on hand to keep me reading for years.