No one seems to recognize the name of Betty MacDonald any more.  When I was little, her humorous books had a place of honor on my mother’s shelves and her series of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books were staple of kid lit in primary school.  She was even responsible for a Hollywood film series.  These days only Google and Wikipedia can find her.

If you aren’t familiar with mid-20th century pop literature, Betty MacDonald was a phenomenon.  Her first book, The Egg and I (Yeah, I bet you thought that name only belonged to a restaurant franchise!) came out the year the war ended  and sold a million copies in less than a year.  It has the single greatest dedication I have ever read (To my Sister Mary, who always believed I can do anything she puts her mind to) and some seventy years later, it’s still good.  Not flawless, but very, very good.

The story is simple.  Betty Bard is raised in a family of fascinating people and learns her mother’s guiding principle for a good marriage is, “whither thou goest, I will go.”   When she was twenty, Betty married Bob, an insurance salesman twelve years older than herself.  Sometime around the honeymoon Bob told Betty he had a dream: instead of selling insurance, he wanted to farm chickens and sell their eggs.  Following her mother’s dicta, Betty followed her husband to start a chicken ranch on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Now farming is a hard life, no matter what you raise or who you are. It takes a lot of physical effort,  the chores never end and you can’t count on a good result.  It’s a lot harder if you weren’t raised in a farm family, like Betty wasn’t.  It gets really hard when little things like electricity and running water are missing and it’s darn near impossible if, like Betty, you live for the Great Indoors, Office Jobs and Paved Streets.  Betty loved the glorious natural beauty of the area (she cites one profane, patriotic soul who insisted “Every #$*&!! thing in this @#$#*&!! place is purty!”) but loathed the back-breaking housework, the farm hours and the rotten, mean-spirited, foolish, quarrelsome chickens who behaved for Bob but pecked at and died on her.  Bob insisted Betty should perform autopsies on the stricken birds and keep records of her findings but he didn’t like Betty’s “cause of death” diagnoses like  Suicide, Eczema, and Chicken Pox.  After four years, Betty was finished.  She packed up their two girls, moved back in with her mother and filed for divorce.

I think it must take a real optimist to begin life over again at the start of the Great Depression but all of the Bards seem to be optimists and many of them became writers.   Betty’s mother wrote for publication and her sister Mary had a string of successful books.  During the Depression Betty worked at a bundle of jobs (memorialized in one of her other books, Anyone Can Do Anything), caught and managed to survive tuberculosis (recounted in The Plague and I which is far funnier than it sounds) and remarried, just in time for America’s entry into World War II.   One night at a party Mary told a publisher that her sister had a book finished and ready for publication (a HUGE lie) and Betty came up with a pitch for The Egg and I overnight to satisfy the publisher.  The book was a smash, staying on the best-seller list for three years and spawning a Hollywood movie, or rather a chain of them, but that only led to more problems.

Of all the personalities Betty threw into The Egg and I, none are more memorable than the Kettle family who lived down the road from Betty and Bob in Puget Sound’s version of Tobacco Road.  Mrs. Kettle may once have cherished the hope of living a gentler, more gracious life but she married Mr. Kettle, whom Bob described as “a lazy, lisping, S*B.”  The Kettles lived in squalor, their animals lived in squalor and the house was falling around their ears but everyone thrived on Mrs. Kettle’s brilliant cooking and her general philosophy of, “I itch, so I scratch; so what!”  Betty maintained the Kettles were creations of her imagination along with the rest of The Egg & I‘s characters but a local family named Bishop believed she was satirizing them, so they sued.  (By then Universal Pictures had started a series of Ma & Pa Kettle pictures and the Bishops may have been mad about the unflattering descriptions or they have believed they deserved royalties).  The Bishops lost.

 Betty wrote one more adult book (Onions in the Stew) about her life on Vashon Island plus her string of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books but died far too soon at the age of 50 and half a century later, her books are discussed by half a handful of individuals who probably remember their mothers reading the books aloud to them (my mother certainly did.)  Perhaps that’s reasonable; I’m not sure.  The book’s not perfect.  Betty’s observations on the Native-Americans in her area are (at best) dated and at worst, downright offensive.  I also know humor is the red-headed stepchild of the literary world and humorists, like Rodney Dangerfield, “Get No Respect.”  I know some best-selling books are not great and don’t really deserve to be remembered and some wonderful writers like Zora Neale Hurston live and die in obscurity and it takes a miracle like Alice Walker’s article to resurrect their literary reputations.  Life’s not fair.  Still, I will re-read The Egg and I and Betty’s other adult books for her glowing descriptions of the Pacific Northwest, for her affectionate view of the world and because she makes me laugh.  That’s what I expect of a humorous book and all I’m really due.  When the book’s done well, that is more than enough.