The ANB is a reference tool, useful for answering questions or facilitating scholarly research. But I encourage readers to sample this update for pleasure, as if they were spending an afternoon in a sidewalk cafe, sipping a drink while watching passersby.
The ANB reveals the stories of those passing by, and often they are wonderful. Consider Oseola McCarty, a sixth-grade dropout who worked her entire life as a laundress in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but lived so frugally that in 1995 she donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi; or Annie Dodge Wauneka, a young Navajo woman who became a leader of the tribe and spearheaded a campaign to combat tuberculosis among her people; or David L. Brainard, the commissary officer of the marooned Lady Franklin Bay Expedition in the Arctic in the 1880s, who was one of only six who returned from the horrors of Cape Sabine.
Updates often include extraordinary coincidences. This update includes the life of Elmer Bernstein who wrote scores for the movies "The Magnificent Seven" (later the theme for the "Marlboro Man" cigarette commercial) and "To Kill a Mockingbird", his most famous score. "Listen to the Mockingbird" (1854) was the most famous composition of another figure in the update, 19th-century songwriter Septimus Winner. (Winner, alas, sold his rights to the song to a publisher for a pittance, while the publisher earned $3 million.)
Another cluster of coincidences involves Macy's and Lord and Taylor's. John Albert Macy (no relation to the New York merchant) helped to write and edit Helen Keller's autobiography and while doing so was drawn to Annie Sullivan, Keller's teacher and intimate friend. Macy and Sullivan eventually married, though the relationship proved unsustainable due to Keller's inseparable ties to Sullivan. Sullivan and Macy eventually divorced.
Macy's the clothing store appears in the essay on Margaret Fishback Antolini, a top advertising copywriter for Macy's, who also wrote sly, cynical poems about marriage which appeared in countless magazines and newspapers. To the amusement of the smart set, she married a rug buyer at Macy's. They later divorced.
On the other side of Fifth Avenue, Dorothy Shaver marketed a line of dolls designed by her sister ("The Five Little Shavers"), sold it to Lord and Taylor's, and in 1921 was hired by the company to keep an eye on competitors Macy's and Gimbels. By 1945 she had become head of Lord and Taylor's, the first woman to lead a Fifth Avenue retail establishment.
But these are merely appetizers. More figures--including the diplomat Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the boxer Floyd Patterson, the business journalist B. C. Forbes, the transistor-inventor Jack Kilby, the labor statistician Carroll Davidson Wright, and the actor Kim Hunter--are served up here, awaiting your delectation.
Mark C. Carnes
General Editor, ANB