It would take more than a fortune-teller to solve Nurse Sue Whittier’s dilemma: Should she tell her dying former sweetheart the truth, or should she leave him in peace and let his scheming wife and brother rob him…?
Clouded Future…
When Sue Whittier unpacked her suitcase, 3000 miles away from the nurses’ dormitory in Maryland, she found a fortune-teller’s crystal ball under her nylons. It was a friend’s idea of a joke, but Sue–who didn’t believe in such things–wished it could tell her what she was letting herself in for. She had driven to California to be with Dave Harding, the man she had walked out on seven years ago just before their wedding–a dying man now who had written, begging her to come. And she had…even though seeing Dave would mean seeing his half-brother, Marv, too–the secret reason Sue had broken that engagement. Still, she was prepared for that. What she wasn’t prepared for was finding another old love of Dave’s at his bedside: Gloria, the blonde he had married on the rebound, the wife who had deserted him two months later and has now returned–with a son she claimed was his. But was it true…? Sue didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her that here was a woman who couldn’t be trusted…
When I read “she found a fortune-teller’s crystal ball under her nylons,” my first thought was, “Well, there’s a an anatomical euphemism I’ve never heard before.”
And if I was Dave Harding, and:
My bride-to-be ditched me at the altar for my half-brother named Marv.
My scheming, blonde ex-wife named Gloria showed up with a snot-nosed kid and a paternity suit.
Add to first mixture alternately with ½ cup syrup drained from pineapple, beating smooth after each addition.
Spread batter over pineapple in pan and bake in moderate oven (350°) 50 to 60 min.
Turn out on plate, serve warm with whipped cream.
Serves 6 to 8.
This postcard is in honor of Chronicler’s Kitchen Krafts find. I haven’t tried the recipe yet, but surely any company-sponsored recipe found on the back of a cheap, hyper-saturated, out-of-register postcard from the mid-60s has got to be delicious, right?
I love this postcard. Perhaps it’s the unusual presentation of the pineapples, or the hand-tinting, or the fact that the name of the city in Ceylon reminds me of a Martin Sexton song. Or perhaps I’m just a sucker for any postcard featuring a fabulous pineapple babe.
There’s actually a variety of pineapple called “Red Ceylon” (ananas comosus CV ‘Red Ceylon’), which is, quite appropriately, the most common pineapple grown in Sri Lanka (nee Ceylon) and India.
“The leaves are dark green with broad red central stripe and red spines on the margins. The fruit is small, 3 to 5 lbs (1.36-2.25 kg), yellow externally; has a thin core and very sweet flesh.”
However, in 2000, Géo Coppens D’Eeckenbrugge and Freddy Leal had the audacity to suggest in The Application of the International Code of Nomenclature to Pineapple Cultivars that the “Red Ceylon” was the horticultural equivalent of an urban legend:
“Following the code, ‘Smooth Cayenne’ is clearly a cultivar….’Queen’ is also a cultivar. A detailed study might allow distinguishing clear differences between local populations or between clonal selections. However no sufficient data exist. Shoot and slip numbers are particularly variable traits. Some selections exhibit particular vigor, as ‘Mc Gregor’, but they cannot be distinguished from other similar selections. Thus, names as ‘Mauritius,’ ‘Malacca,’ ‘Red Ceylon,’ and ‘Buitenzorg.’ ‘Ripley Queen’, ‘Alexandra’ and ‘Mc Gregor’ must be considered synonyms to ‘Queen’. Only the tetraploid ‘Z’ or ‘James Queen’, found in South Africa (Nyenhuis, 1974), must be considered a distinct cultivar.”
Rubbish! And if you’re going to consolidate the naming conventions, surely an exotic name like “Red Ceylon” should win out over something as bland as “Queen.”
But they’re right about “Buitenzorg,” which should be taken out behind the nomenclature shed and put out of its misery.
The life and high adventure of an American missionary nurse in the primitive Congo.
WITCHCRAFT!
Nurse Ellen Burton could smell fresh blood.
The she saw the chilling scene. A goat had been pegged to the ground. Aganza was groveling on all fours in front of it. N’Devli, the witch doctor, jumped up and down screeching wildly. Each time he hit the ground, he pricked Aganza with his spear.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Ellen shrieked. Without thinking of her own safety, she leaped forward and wrenched the spear from the witch doctor’s hands.
In the next instant the snarling old man raised a gleaming knife high above her head…
White Witch Doctor is high adventure at its thrilling best. An amazing story of a missionary nurse’s life in the Belgian Congo, it is filled with relentless excitement, warm humor and great love.
But why settle for a pastiche of crude cultural and racial stereotypes when you can have a pastiche of crude cultural, racial, and religious stereotypes?
The chapter illustrations are worth noting. Here are just a few, along with the portion of the chapter related to the illustration:
Chapter 6
The story began with a description of the filing of front teeth, once a mark of cannibalism. The teeth were not literally filed. The witch doctor sat on a boy’s chest and, with a stone chisel and wooden mallet, chipped bits of the teeth away–much as the Indians used to make arrowheads. The operation, unbearably cruel, was a test of a boy’s manhood, of his general fitness to become a hardy, responsible member of the tribe.
Some of the teeth were hopelessly ruined, and when the boy reached the foppish age of young manhood, he carved others to take their place. They were sometimes amazing creations. Carved of wood or ivory, according to the wealth of the young man, they represented his accomplishments–a lion killed, or an elephant, or a leopard, or, if he had somehow acquired much wealth and therefore many wives, a phallic symbol. Some were exquisitely carved. But, beautiful or crude, these teeth were set on pins and inserted into the decayed roots in the young warrior’s head.
Onege had many such teeth…and he acknowledged his debt to the missionaries in his own fashion. He carved himself one more tooth, which he always wore in the presence of a white man. It protruded from his upper gum and extended over his lower lip clear to the tip of his chin. It was a beautifully proportioned, exquisitely carved ivory cross.
Chapter 10
When Dr. Charles came, I laughed at his mountainous luggage, forgetting that I had been guilty of exactly the same thing. Among other odds and ends, he brought a galvanized iron bath tub, which we all looked at with wondering eyes, hoping desperately that sometime, somehow, we should be invited to bathe in it. Just to sit down in that tub and feel soft, warm, perhaps even perfumed, water lapping about our tummies suddenly seemed the most enticing experience imaginable. We never knew that luxury, however. Only a few days after Dr. Charles set up the tub in his bathing dukas–with a most ingenious arrangement of plumbing contrived from joints of bamboo–his wife found a snake coiled up in the bottom of it one morning, and in her efforts to kill it with a club, she knocked apart every seam in the tub.
“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did…
“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
