Betty MacDonald was born Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard on March 26, 1908, in Boulder, Colorado. She was the daughter of Darsie Campbell Bard, a mining engineer, and Elsie Tholimar Sanderson.
Her family moved from one mining project to another in Colorado, Mexico, Montana, and Idaho; finally, when she was nine, they settled in Seattle, Wash.
Betty was an honor student at Roosevelt High School in Seattle and attended the University of Washington for one year, planning to major in art. Her formal education was ended in 1927.
Betty's husband Heskett wanted to be a chicken farmer, so the couple moved to an isolated farm near Chimacum, Washington, that they had bought for $450. Living conditions were primitive, and MacDonald could arouse no enthusiasm for raising chickens. "By the end of the second spring, " she wrote later, "I hated everything about the chicken but the egg. "
The farming experiences became, fifteen years later, the subject of her first and most widely read book, The Egg and I (1945). It was an exuberant account of an unconventional childhood and a crisp, light-hearted description of the endless work, odd characters, loneliness, and other rigors and infelicities of simple rural life.
MacDonald was encouraged to write the book by an older sister, Mary Bard, who wrote The Doctor Wears Three Faces (1949). The Egg and I, which was partially serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, climbed quickly to the top of the best-seller list and stayed there for months. By August 1946, less than a year after publication, sales reached a million copies; eventually the book sold more than two million copies in all editions.
MacDonald was paid $100, 000 by International Pictures for the rights to the motion picture, which starred Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. A successful series of "Ma and Pa Kettle" films, based on characters in the book, came later. After separating from her first husband in 1931, MacDonald had returned to Seattle to begin a business career.
During the Great Depression, she held various jobs, including secretarial work for a mining engineer, managing a chain letter office, and selling advertising. She also worked for a number of government agencies, becoming the only woman labor adjuster in the National Recovery Administration.
Later, MacDonald was employed by the Treasury Department, and by the National Youth Administration as a director of publicity (1939 - 1942). This period of her life was chronicled in Anybody Can Do Anything (1950). In 1938, MacDonald contracted tuberculosis and was confined until mid-1939 in a Seattle sanatorium. Her experiences there, which ended with her cure, were narrated with her customary gusto and irreverence in The Plague and I (1948).
The book contained helpful and interesting information about tuberculosis and treatment of the disease at that time. After 1945, MacDonald wrote five books for children stories about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, who specialized in concocting cures for bad habits.
( When Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a s...)
("The best thing about the Depression was the way it reuni...)
("Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like ...)
( A classic story from one of the most beloved children's...)
Quotations:
“There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book. ”
“The coffee was so strong it snarled as it lurched out of the pot. ”
“I'll do it because I want to but not because you tell me to!”
“In the country, weather is as important as food and sometimes means the difference between life and death. ”
“In the country Sunday is the day on which you do exactly as much work as you do on other days but feel guilty all the time you are doing it because Sunday is a day of rest. ”
“Our little room was morbidly quiet and sorrow was heaped in my corner like dirty snow. ”
“Gammy used to say, 'Too much scrubbing takes the life right out of things. '”
“I am neither Christian enough nor charitable enough to like anybody just because he is alive and breathing. I want people to interest or amuse me. I want them fascinating and witty or so dul as to be different. I want them either intellectually stimulating or wonderfully corny; perfectly charming or hundred percent stinker. I like my chosen companions to be distinguishable from the undulating masses and I don't care how. ”
“Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take an aspirin and comment on his neatly tied shoes. Almost anybody would rather be known for expert shoe-tying than for kicking the cat. " She always tells whiners how charming they are bullies how brave bad sports how good sneaks how honest!”
“Dare we face the question of just how much of the darkness around us is of our own making?”
MacDonald lived with her family on Vashon Island, Wash. , in a rambling old house, with her two daughters. They were "at the mercy" of tides, ferry schedules, fog, weeds, and the strains of raising adolescent children. The period is described in her last autobiographical book, Onions in the Stew (1955). Like her earlier works, this is a projection of a remarkably spirited personality.
A suit seeking $900, 000 from MacDonald and her publisher was filed in a Seattle court in 1950 by nine members of a single family who contended they were humiliated by being identified as the real-life characters pictured as the Kettles in The Egg and I. A tenth person, seeking $75, 000, claimed to be humiliated because he was portrayed in the book as Indian Crowbar. The defendants were cleared on all counts after a jury trial. The MacDonalds bought a cattle ranch in Carmel Valley, Calif. , in 1953 and moved there in 1956. Two years later MacDonald returned to Seattle for medical treatment, and died there.
In 1927, Betty MacDonald married Robert Eugene Heskett, an insurance salesman; they had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 1935.
On April 24, 1942, she married Donald Chauncey MacDonald, a real estate operator; they had no children.
Was a mining engineer.
1904–1970 Was a 20th-century American author.
Died in 2005.
1895–1951
1910–1975
