Betty MacDonald had a farm - Brief Article

Sunset, Sept, 2001 by Peter Fish

* VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON--Judith Manerud Lawrence has compiled scrapbooks of letters from around the world.

"Dear Betty," writes a woman from Bristol, England. "I do hope this letter manages to locate you. I wanted you to know how much pleasure your books have given me over the past 15 years."

"Betty" was Betty MacDonald, and she lived on Vashon Island, a ferry ride from Seattle, on property Judith Lawrence now owns. MacDonald has been dead for more than 40 years, but people want to believe she is still here. Judith Lawrence says, "People just wish they could know Betty's family"

MacDonald was born in Colorado in 1908 and came to Seattle in grade school. At 18, she married and went with her new husband to start a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula. She had two children, divorced, returned to Seattle, spent eight months in a tuberculosis sanatorium, remarried, and moved to Vashon Island.

And--why all this matters--she wrote about these events in a way that made millions of readers laugh out loud. Her first book, The Egg and I, told the story of the ill-fated chicken farm. The weather was brutal: "After Christmas it rained and rained and rained and dusk settled like a shroud at a little after three o'clock." The neighbors--notably the rustic Maw and Paw Kettle--were eccentric. As for the farm's avian output, MacDonald reveals her attitude in the chapter titled, "I Learn to Hate Even Baby Chickens."

The Egg and I appeared in 1945 and was a publishing phenomenon. "Unadulterated fun," enthused the New York Herald Tribune Book Review. "Not to be missed," said the New York Post. At the time, Egg was probably the biggest-selling book ever to have been written by a Northwestern author. Claudette Colbert starred in the movie; Maw and Paw Kettle inspired their own series of films. MacDonald became famous and well-off enough to afford the property on Vashon Island. She wrote more books: The Plague and I, about her time in the TB sanatorium, Anybody Can Do Anything, about her life in the Depression, and Onions in the Stew, about Vashon Island.

After MacDonald died in 1958, her books faded into that limbo where former best-sellers reside, shelved tea-stained in used bookstores, or ignored in spare bedrooms, which was where I found The Plague and I. But she was never entirely forgotten. When Lawrence bought the Vashon property, she would encounter strangers wandering up from the ferry, searching for Betty. Many had come from far away. "She's very big in Britain, Germany, and the Czech Republic," says Lawrence. "Czechs have been through adversity, and she wrote about adversity with such humor." Says MacDonald's granddaughter, Heidi Richards, "People in Europe are amazed there isn't a monument to her."

Now, if not a monument, there is a revival. Egg and Plague and Onions and Anybody are back in print. The Vashon Library has created a special collection on the island's most famous writer. Lawrence has turned part of the MacDonald property into an inn, where guests can experience Betty's world first-hand.

I walked around the inn grounds looking for familiar scenes. I remembered being 13 and reading the books one after another, then starting all over again. It struck me that MacDonald had created a world where outlandish catastrophes--ranging from balky stoves to tuberculosis--might happen but could always be mastered with pluck and laughter. Such comic Arcadias are among the most compelling of dreams: When you find a good one, you don't want to give it up.

Back in the scrapbook, I read a letter from another fan. "When we have bad weather and are all iced in," she wrote, "or if I ever feel gloomy, just reading how she coped in similar situations cheers me up." Out where I live, we don't get iced in. But it can get gloomy, and I am in complete agreement on the cure.

Betty MacDonald Farm: MacDonald's books in print include The Egg and I (HarperCollins, New York), and Anybody Can Do Anything, Onions in the Stew, and The Plague and I (Trafalgar Square, North Pomfret, VT).