When I was in college, my best friend and I decided we wanted to make a Betsy-Tacy pilgrimage to Mankato. This was in 1965, and we were taking classes in library science. We went to the Minnesota Historical Society, did research and were agog to learn the names, the real names, of people who were the models for the Betsy-Tacy characters, and to discover that, as of about 15 years earlier, Marion "Carney" Willard had been still alive and living in Minneapolis. Back in the dorm, we looked her up in the phone book--and she was still there.
We wrote her a letter, recruited two other friends. She, almost by return post, invited us to tea.
We knocked on her door at the appointed hour with a huge bouquet of daisies, which I knew would be her favorite flower. (The daisy chain, right?) Gretchen tried to talk me out of daisies, but I would have none of it. When we saw her, I said we tried to pick her favorite flower, and she said, "Oh, they must be daisies!" This was one of the great moments of my life. She served us tea on her mother's handpainted bone china, showed us her photo albums, told us story after story, and informed us we must visit Cab on our scheduled trip to Mankato on Mayday. Shortly after I met her, I wrote down what happened at that meeting, and I offer you a couple of tidbits here!
"'Bobby' really had sold bluing to win a baseball suit, and when it finally came it was quite sleazy. Two big letter "B"s came with it, and he begged his mother to sew them on. When she did, the rest of the family called him "bawl Baby," "Brat Boy," etc., until he begged to have them taken off.""('Sam') didn't have enough money even on the day they got their marriage license. He met her after her graduation from college. She was the new school teacher, and when he saw her walking down the street in a pink dress, he asked a friend who she was and said then and there he was going to take her out. Pink WAS his favorite color! She was full of stories about him--for instance, the spring day when they were out on a hill, and he was picking violets like crazy, muttering all the while, "And to think I paid a dollar a bunch for these all winter!" He'd forgotten to buy flowers for her on their wedding day, and when he found out about it, he went down to the florist and got two dozen enormous cabbage roses, which almost covered the bride up. Her parents had objected at first when she wanted to marry him--he never was the churchgoing type."
We went to Mankato, went to the Carnegie Library, found a 1910 city directory and looked things up. Lots of things. Then we toured all of the Betsy-Tacy sites, climbed up the Big Hill (a woman threatened to call the police because we were trespassing) and then went to see Cab and Jean. When he answered the door (it was a surprise), I asked if he was Cab Edwards and he burst into a grin and invited us in! They were lovely, wonderful, and Jean drove us to Little Syria and back to the bus depot.
We wrote to Maud, who already knew of our existence from the others, and she wrote us several long, informative letters and sent us a photo of herself and Bick wearing identical dresses (at 70). [ed. note: A copy of this photo is sent to new members of the Maud Hart Lovelace Society] She was very excited about our adventures and wrote about us and our pilgrimage in the little booklet T.Y. Crowell published about her. She also saved my original letter to her, and Merian sent it back to me a couple of years ago.
The next year, you will not believe this, we got into the high school house. Got into it and explored it, upstairs and down. I have a photo of me sitting on the bathtub! It belonged to the college and it was empty, but a sign on the door said to come in. No one was there, but we went in and went through it. It was torn down to make a parking lot three months later. I wrote all of this up that summer--18 pages long. I am so glad I have that because it is all still fresh in my mind thanks to that. Gretchen and I went to Maud's funeral in 1980 and several other fans there were thrilled to finally solve the mystery of who those college girls who had made a pilgrimage really were. It was not a big funeral.
There was a lunch in the basement just like there is at just about every church funeral in Minnesota.
And, in 1992, when Anna Quindlen gave her BETSY RAY AS FEMINIST ICON talk here, all four girls from 1965 were reunited for the first time. And Barbara Harvey knows one of them too. It IS a small world.