Elkridge (1938-1961) and Mom's Sugar Donuts

Inducted in 1966, Elkridge had the longest career of any horse in The National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. In a career that included 123 races, he cleared hundreds of fences and fell only once. He was the nation's champion at 4 and then again, when he was owned and trained by my grandfather, at age 8.

He caught the attention of New Yorker "Race Track" Columnist Audax Minor, probably around 1946:

I'd like to pin a few stars and ribbons on Elkridge, who won the Meadow Brook Steeplechase, at Belmont, the other afternoon. It always gives me a warm glow to watch this veteran run. He's eleven years old, you know, but he has such a vigorous way of going that horsemen find him either entertaining or wonderful, depending on the boiling point of their enthusiasm. Whether or not he's the best jumper since Jolly Roger, he certainly is as hard-working a one as we have ever had, and he's by far the biggest money winner in the annals of steeplechasing. He has started 96 times, finishing first 26 times, second 15 times and third 11. What is even more remarkable, I think, is the fact that he has fallen only once.

Elkridge, a rangy, medium-sized bay gelding by Mate, was developed by the late Thomas Hitchcock, who turned out so many famous jumpers. (Incidentally, Elkridge is the last Hitchcock jumper still in steeplechasing.) He was bought by Kent Miller for $7000, at the dispersal of the Hitchcock stable, in the autumn of 1942. Since then, he has won nearly every jumping race of importance and earned $178,055. Elkridge, who is something of a family pet, has a hankering for sugar-covered doughnuts, a habit he acquired from being fed bits of them by Miller's little daughter, Phyllis (sic--he means my mom Phoebe, seen below).

Come to think of it, some racers have the most extraordinary tastes. There was once an animal-I can't recall his name at the moment-who was crazy about beef stew. Goldie F., a fast runner of other days, doted on Bermuda onions. Alsab liked grapefruit. Anyway, lots of sugared doughnuts to Elkridge. He has earned them.

Elkridge was indeed the great family provider in his day.

Phoebe Miller Bryan 1938-2010

In her final days, my mother was surrounded by three generations of family who filled her small house with love, laughter and many, many tears.
Her adult life wasn't easy, which must have seemed incredibly unfair to the little girl inside. That girl had a mostly idyllic childhood in Camden, South Carolina.
Her father owned and trained Elkridge, one of the greatest steeple chasers in racing history.

My mom could do anything she wanted in Camden.
She won ribbons riding horses
She won trophies playing tennis.
She danced with beaus at cotillions
She lived in a huge house called Cool Springs.
She attended private schools with the town's richest children.
There was just one problem.
One day the money was gone.

What happened to the money isn't so clear but soon, it became obvious that the Millers would have to pull all their children out of their private schools. Mom would no longer go to school with the friends she met at horse shows, the dances and the tennis courts.
Perhaps not a big deal in a northern city, but in a small Southern town, it made all the difference.
On the public school bus, this little blond girl must have been steaming. It wasn't her fault the family had run out of money so why should she suffer?
When the bus stopped in front of her new school, Mom stepped down and began running. She ran past her brother and sister and raced down the street. She ran past the shops and past the library. She ran right up to the door of the private school, took a breath and swung the door open. There was nobody in the hallways so she walked straight back into her old classroom. She sat down at her old desk. She stared hard at the teacher just daring her to say something.
Nobody did.
Mom got to finish that school year at the private school

For Mom, money would always be an issue. Even after a divorce settlement considered generous by her own lawyer, she lived , in the best of times, paycheck to paycheck.
Lansing and I would live with our Dad in a New England saltbox with a swimming pool in a big backyard.
Then we'd live with Mom in small rental home with an old dodge dart in the driveway. There, in Sparks, Nevada, we qualified for a program that let us buy school lunches for 35 cents.

In our teens, we went to boarding schools with children whose families were among the richest in the nation.
Then we'd spend summers eating peanut butter sandwiches and working minimum wage jobs at casinos or restaurants.
(We had it easy compared to the miracle of our family, my sister Alyssa.)
Throughout it all, even in the worst of times, Mom had pluck.
After her memorial service, I visited her musty basement. In the corner I found an old Wilson tennis racket. On the handle she had stenciled two words.
CONCENTRATE.
ATTACK.

The little girl inside ,who could do anything she tried, would speak to her now and then.
After decades breathing in second hand smoke while dealing cards at Circus Circus,
Mom quit that miserable job and went back to school.
She graduated from the University of Nevada.
She bought a house across the street from campus.
That steel magnolia quality saw her through several bouts with cancer.
She fought even after her body gave out.
My God, she was so angry at her legs when they wouldn't let her get out of bed.
And I believe that spirit lives on.
Not just in the little house where tenants swear they hear someone playing a piano.
But in my own daughter, a competitive ball of fire named for the town my mom always thought of as home.
The night mom died, Camden says someone was in her room.
I'd like to think it was mom delivering two words of advice:
CONCENTRATE.
ATTACK.
I love you Mom and miss you more than I ever would have dreamed.

The Sword Over the Mantel, 1960

My grandfather was born in Richmond and brought up in the former capital of the Confederate States. The city's atmosphere was still that capital's in the early 1900's of his childhood.
As a child he would be lifted to the deep window sill beneath the library wall. There, beneath a sword that once belonged to General Robert E. Lee he'd perform the following poem:

Forth from its scabbard pure and bright,
Flashed the sword of Lee!
Far in the front of the deadly fight
High o'er the brave in the cause of Right
Its stainless sheen like a beacon of light
Led us to victory


He grew up in a huge home, Laburnum, with his grandfather and grandmother, his father and mother; three of his four uncles who were not yet married and assorted relatives, friends, servants and dogs. He is seen to the left, standing with his seated cousin, Thomas Pinckney, in a photgraph dated 1917.

His grandfather, Joseph Bryan, fought as a private with Colonel Mosby's Rangers. He was injured twice.
Mosby told his men "I will tolerate no blasphemy or profanity in my command under any circumstances but one: I permit you to call, 'Surrender, you Yankee son of a bitch!'"

His Great-uncle Ran was a ballonist. General Joe Johnston sent him a hundred feet above the treetops to spy on Yankee positions. His adventures are worthy of a future post. Historian Burke Davis wrote a book about them called Runaway Balloon.


My grandfather's most colorful uncle was St George Tucker Coalter Bryan, nicknamed Teasey ( or "T.C" for his middle initials). After the war in which he served as an artilleryman with 2nd Company, Richmond Howitzers, Teasey went west and lived among the Zuni indians, sharing a hut with a gold-miner and a wrestling bear. Thirty years of this cooled him down, and he came back to Virginia. He is the first man on the left of this photograph. Joseph Bryan is standing on the far right.


And finally there is one more great-uncle, Capt. Thomas Pinckney. He had starved as a Yankee prisoner at Morris Island outside Charleston, SC. He once told my grandfather offhandedly, "You get used to them after a while, son. Rats don't taste all that bad".
All of these stories, and many more, are told in my grandfather's 1960 memoir, The Sword Over the Mantel: The Civil War and I

Summer at Squam Lake, 1951

In the summer of 1951, the summer after Dad has been accidentally shot, his family rented a house on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. Today it is best known as the setting of the 1981 film On Golden Pond. But for a fifteen year old with a few empty pages in his scrapbook, it became a place of happy memories that would now be sixty years old.



On the day they left Squam Lake to head back home to Washington DC, Dad took some photographs. He handed the camera to his sister Joan for the first shot here. Dad sitting in front of "The Swamp."
Away from the family house, Dad could stay here alone with Rudolf the cat . What 15 year old wouldn't enjoy a place to himself?
"It had one bedroom, a closet, and a bathroom. It was a great looking place really" he writes in the margins.
There's a shot below of Aunt Joan. 18 years old. A College student at one of the Seven Sisters. Barnard College? I'll have to ask.




Above is a shot of a friend who, at the age of 11, was already smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. He's wearing a ribbon for swimming or canoeing.




"Here is Daddy squinting into the bright sun".

"Here is a nicely blurred picture of Saint and the Oldsmobile in the driveway in front of the house."



"This one here is a group picture consisting of Mom, Dad, Hulda, Al and Rudolf(the white cat in Oma's arms). Notice the poses assumed by the dogs".

As the summer drew to a close Dad returned to Episcopal High School in Virginia for what would unexpectedly turn out to be his final year.



Squam Lake today.
The Number One Song That Summer:
"Too Young" by Nat King Cole

Oma

For Christmas my sister Lansing gave me scanned copies of two treasured photographs featuring our grandmother, Katharine Lansing Barnes. To many she was known as "Sister". To us she was Oma.

In this photograph, she and our grandfather are walking outside Central Park on a brisk wintry day. They married October 4, 1930, both in their mid-twenties. After working as a reporter and editor at various newspapers and magazines ( Parade, Town and Country, The Saturday Evening Post) Grandpa Joe joined the Navy during World War 2. After the war he worked for the CIA.

In a half hearted attempt to join the CIA the author John O'Hara ( Appointment in Samarra, Pal Joey) filled out an application and attended a dinner party arranged by his friend, our grandfather, in 1949. He got so drunk he pretty much disqualified himself from service. The next morning Oma congratulated him. She said getting drunk was the most sensible thing he could have done.

Five years later, O'Hara's wife, Belle, died and he eventually began seeing newly seperated Oma, described by Frank MacShane in The Life of John O'Hara as " a witty, stylish and outgoing person who got on with literary people such as Dorothy Parker as well as with the social world in which she was brought up". They married in 1955. Our grandfather sent a telegram of congratulations signed "Frying Pan".

They lived a comfortable life with a house in Princeton and another in Quogue. O'Hara became disenchanted with New York City (" all glass and parking lots , with no building, residential or otherwise, safe from the wrecker's big iron ball") but he and Oma were among the exclusive 540 people who attended Truman Capote's famous black and white ball at The Plaza in 1966. Sinatra was there. Mailer. Warhol. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Garbo.

The New York Times described arriving guests as rolling "off the assembly line like dolls, newly painted and freshly coiffed, packaged in silk, satin and jewels".

<--Truman Capote gets masked up for his ball

The ball was a great publicity stunt: the most lavish book release party of all time. The book: In Cold Blood.

Candace Bergin dancing. Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra arriving. ( The men got rid of their masks as soon as they could).

A recent book about the "party of the century".

Inside the Plaza ballroom.

A Sad Anniversary December 15th, 2010

From the Los Angeles Times

C.D.B. Bryan, whose 1976 book "Friendly Fire" about the accidental death of a soldier in Vietnam struck a chord with disillusioned Americans, has died. He was 73.

Bryan died Tuesday of cancer at his home in Guilford, Conn., said his wife, Mairi. He was holding one of his favorite shaken martinis when he died, she said.

Although Bryan wrote extensively for several magazines throughout his career, he was best known for "Friendly Fire."

The book, which started as an article for the New Yorker, is based on the 1970 friendly fire shrapnel death of Iowa soldier Michael Eugene Mullen. It chronicled his parents' doubts about the Army's official account of the death, their quest for answers and the transformation of his mother, Peg Mullen, into an ardent antiwar activist. She died in October.

"He was very proud of the fact that he exposed the friendly fire issue, and the fact that the government was lying to people who were as very patriotic as the Mullens were," Mairi Bryan said Friday. "Of all of his works, 'Friendly Fire' was the one of which he was most proud."

The book was turned into a 1979 Emmy-winning television movie starring Carol Burnett, Ned Beatty, Sam Waterston and Timothy Hutton.

C.D.B. Bryan, whose full name was Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan, was born in New York City in 1936. He always enjoyed writing and credited his stepfather, novelist John O'Hara, with nurturing his interest in fiction.

Bryan, known to friends as Courty and Courtlandt, especially liked good conversation and good martinis -- always shaken, never stirred, Mairi Bryan said.

"He was one of the great conversationalists of his time. He could really hold a room," she said.

Bryan used those storytelling skills in several publications, including the New Yorker, Harper's and the New York Times Book Review, for which he did scores of reviews.

Bryan graduated from Yale University, was an Army veteran and wrote several books in addition to "Friendly Fire."

In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters, a son, a stepson and a stepdaughter.

His son, St. George Bryan, said he will be cremated and his remains stored in martini shakers until a memorial service after the holidays.

From The Independent (UK):

The sense that the hearts and minds of the American people could be moved away from supporting their government's military actions was derided by neo-cons in the Reagan era as "the Vietnam Syndrome". That denigrates the real sense of disillusionment within middle America over the Vietnam war, a sense that was never described better than in Friendly Fire, the 1976 book by C.D.B. Bryan.


Originally commissioned as a single article by the New Yorker magazine, Friendly Fire told the story of the 1970 death in Vietnam of Iowa-born solider Michael Mullen, killed by shrapnel from his own artillery, and the process by which, in the face of official cover-up, his mother, Peg, had her middle-American faith shattered and replaced by anti-war activism. Bryan was so taken by the story he expanded the article into a series, and then a best-selling book, and eventually an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television film starring Carol Burnett, Sam Waterston, and Timothy Hutton.

Although Friendly Fire is the book for which Bryan will be remembered, in many ways it was atypical of his career as a jobbing writer in the élite literary milieu of New York, and a formidable and entertaining presence at the cocktail parties which are the currency of that world. Bryan came to it naturally. Courtland Dixon Barnes Bryan was born in New York 22 April 1936; his father was a magazine editor and journalist. When his parents divorced, his mother Katharine Barnes married the novelist John O'Hara. Bryan grew up mostly in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a rural retreat for many New York artists. He attended a number of schools and managed to enter Yale, graduating in 1958. After service in Army intelligence in Korea and Berlin, he returned to New York, working on the satirical magazine Monocle.

His early New Yorker short story, "So Much Unfairness Of Things", based on his being thrown out of one prep school for cheating, grew into his first novel, P.S. Wilkinson (1965) which won the Harper Prize for first novels. His second novel, The Great Deathcliffe (1970) was a reworking of The Great Gatsby. But little in his work reviewing, writing essays and stories and teaching in creative writing programmes, including three years at the University of Iowa, suggested the empathy he would find, and express so powerfully, for the Mullen family.

Friendly Fire became a signpost for the loss of what Richard Nixon called "The Silent Majority". They may have been won back in the Reagan and Bush presidencies, but the legacy of Bryan's work still carries power. The most highly-publicised critic of George W. Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was not a politican, but Cindy Sheehan, like Peg Mullen the mother of a soldier killed in action, while the friendly-fire killing of the former football star Pat Tillman, and the attendant cover-up, was turned by his celebrity into a major story.

Bryan was married four times, and his best novel, Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes (1983) is a bleak yet touchingly honest look at failed romance. He wrote two coffee-table books, on The National Air And Space Museum and National Geographic Magazine, as well as the introduction to an impressive collection of photographs from the first Iraq war, In The Eye Of Desert Storm. His last book, Close Encounters Of The Fourth Kind (1995), is a study of UFOs and those who believe in them, among whom was Bryan's father.

Bryan died of cancer at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, and was holding a martini when he died. According to his son, St. George, Bryan would be cremated and his remains kept in a cocktail shaker until a memorial service could be held.

Michael Carlson

Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan, writer: born New York City 22 April 1936; married firstly Phoebe Miller (marriage dissolved; one son, one daughter), secondly Judith Snyder (marriage dissolved; one daughter), thirdly Monique Widmer (marriage dissolved; two stepchildren), 2007 Mairi Graham; died Guilford, Connecticut 15 December 2009.

Lost at Sea: Saint Bryan II September 1969

In late September, 1969, Dad learned that his brother Saint was missing from a catamaran he and a friend had been sailing off the coast of Maui. He and Aunt Joan flew out to Honolulu to do what they could. Notes from those frantic days include lists of people to contact.
The Coast Guard, Boat Yard, Newspapers, Radio & TV, Wailuku Police, Friends.
But there was no hope. Dad always said he lost not just an older brother that day but his best friend.
Among the letters of condolence Dad received is this one from family friend Finis Farr.

8 November 1969
Dear Courty:
It must have been an ordeal for you and Joan, going to Hawaii. I have thought of you often since I got the news about Saint. Losing a brother or sister must give one an especially desolate feeling, all the more poignant, I should suppose, when the one who died was still young. Saint was someone I always held in particularly high affection, because he was himself, gentle, responsive and bright.

It occurs to me now that he was ahead of his times--one of the first do-your-own thing people, and as such not fully understood by many But I think I had an inkling of what he was getting at. Perhaps I am patting myself on the back; if so, I should add that I spent one of the saddest afternoons I can recall a few weeks ago when I walked over to the post office around noon and picked up your father's note telling me that Saint and been lost and there was no more hope.

I telephoned your mother and father right away, and they were,of course, so brave and "good" about it that I found it heartbreaking, I say to you in confidence. The telephone to the voice is like the camera to the face, is it not?
Since then, in thinking of Saint, it occured to me that you'd told me, not long ago, that he was happy in Hawaii. So that part is all right. I just wish he could have gone on being happy in Hawaii.

Another thing--there's no doubt Saint had talent and I wonder if he was writing, and if you found material of interest among his papers. You understand I didn't think he was obliged to write or had to write, but I remember seeing some stories he wrote at college and they were good,
I do hope your work is shaping up as you want it, and that all goes well with you and yours
Yrs as ever,
Finis

When Dad called to tell us what happened (Lansing and I were both under 5 years old) he said Uncle Saint had dived off the boat to save a drowning friend but that the sea pulled both of them under. Recently, I was told the friend had suffered from "The Bends". He may have been partially paralyzed.

In The Great Dethriffe, Dad's second novel published in 1972, he writes that his brother had found happiness in Hawaii.

And I loved him because I knew for generations and generations back in all our other lives we had always been brothers, as we would be brothers in future lives as well...
"You know, pal" he said..."All these years I've been the older brother. I've always led and you've always followed. Well, I've just been thinking that I'd like to follow you for a while. You're my best friend and I want to be your best friend. I'd like you to lead."
"I know," I said, "but I like following you. I like you to lead. It's okay. And besides, farther on where the path gets wider, we can walk side by side."
"I'd really like that." he said.


Uncle Saint and Dad, 1938.