THE MARCH OF TIME Written by Jon Lellenberg Performed at the BSI cocktail party, 24 Fifth Avenue, New York City, January 8, 1994, by Jon Lellenberg and Clint Gould The early ’30s: Prohibition and Depression, gangsters and G-men. Vitaphone in the movie houses, Herbert Hoover in the White House, and Americans in speakeasies. Christopher Morley’s Three Hours for Lunch Club knows some speakeasies too. In one of them it begets the Grillparzer Sittenpolizei Verein, which finds itself becoming more and more Sherlockian as it drinks, dines and talks the hours away BSI Archive; photo by Dorothy Stix, BSI in Christ Cella’s back room on East 45th Street. Sherlock Holmes is in the air in the early ’Thirties. The last of A. Conan Doyle’s stories have been published. Doubleday Doran brings out The Complete Sherlock Holmes, with a memorable introduction by Chris Morley. William Gillette is completing his Farewell Tour of Sherlock Holmes, Clive Brook, Arthur Wontner and others are portraying Holmes in the movies, and Edith Meiser is dramatizing the Great Detective’s adventures on radio. 1933: Al Capone goes to jail. FDR offers America a New Deal. Ernest Hemingway displaces F. Scott Fitzgerald as America’s leading novelist. A newcomer named Katherine Hepburn wins the Academy Award for Best Actress in Morning Glory. And in December, America gets what it wants for Christmas: the end of Prohibition. In October, a Chicago writer named Vincent Starrett publishes an unusual sort of biography called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The time is ripe for sodality — even whisky and sodality, says Christopher Morley — and the idea of a club called the Baker Street Irregulars occurs to Starrett in Chicago and Morley in New York simultaneously. 1934: The cocktail is king again. The birth of screwball comedy, Carole Lombard’s 20th Century, signals an uplift in the national mood. The Rainbow Room opens atop the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center. And Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night sweeps the Oscars. The only item of real interest from abroad is the Prince of Wales’ scandalous romance with Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Christopher Morley acts before Starrett, on January 6th, founding the BSI with a birthday party for Sherlock Holmes at the Hotel Duane in the East ’Thirties. Soon after he announces its birth in the Saturday Review of Literature, Elmer Davis’s Constitution and Buy-Laws for the BSI appear there as well, followed in May by Frank V. Morley’s Sherlock Holmes Crossword as the BSI’s membership exam. (Quite a few women solve the Crossword; but only men are invited to the BSI dinners to come that year.) On June 5th, the BSI holds dinner upstairs at Christ Cella’s, sending greetings to the first meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society in London, at Canuto’s restaurant in Baker Street on June 6th. And on December 7th, irregularly, the first annual dinner of the BSI takes place. Present besides Morley, his Grillparzer friends, and some Crossword winners, are Archie Macdonell, founder of England’s Sherlock Holmes Society; Vincent Starrett from Chicago, Gray Chandler Briggs from St. Louis, and H. W. Bell from Boston; William Gillette and Frederic Dorr Steele; and Alexander Woollcott, the Algonquin Round-Table’s enfant terrible — definitely not Christopher Morley’s favorite person. Innocently invited that night by Vincent Starrett, Woollcott proceeds to outrage almost everyone there, and afterwards publishes a mocking report of the event for The New Yorker. 1936: Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, and London and Paris embark upon appeasement. At home, FDR wins a second term as most Americans clamor for neutrality abroad. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance their way across the silver screen. The country goes wild when Benny Goodman’s band introduces swing one night at an L.A. ballroom. And a genteel lady in Georgia publishes a novel called Gone With the Wind. The BSI holds its second annual dinner that January, then sinks into four long years of hibernation. But later this year, a General Motors executive in New York named Edgar W. Smith reads The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and writes an enthusiastic letter of appreciation to its author. He will have to wait nearly a year for a reply, since Vincent Starrett is away, in China, as the Chicago Tribune correspondent in Peking. 1940: War is underway in Europe now: Germany conquers France, Winston Churchill moves into 10 Downing Street and hurls defiance at Berlin, the RAF wins the Battle of Britain, and FDR wins a third term, despite his pledge to turn a nervous America into the Arsenal of Democracy. In January, thanks to Edgar Smith’s persistence, the BSI is revived. The 1940 dinner is the most luminous ever: the Murray Hill Hotel ushers in a Golden Age of Irregular sodality and scholarship there. It is Edgar Smith’s first dinner, marking the commencement of his invaluable service as the BSI’s Buttons-cum-Commissionaire for the next twenty years; it is the only time that all three Morley brothers are present; and it is a publication party for the first collection of BSI writings, 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, edited by Vincent Starrett. Even a Conan Doyle is there that night. Denis gives a charming talk, but where his father’s memory is concerned, he leaves that night with an impression of Irregular irreverence that leads to a feud between the BSI and Sir Arthur’s sons. 1942: America reels, then recovers from the attack at Pearl Harbor, and sends the pride of the Japanese Navy to the bottom of the sea at the Battle of Midway in June. Irregulars get into uniform and march off to war. Even Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in movies and radio is mobilized. Jimmy Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy lifts American spirits, while the unnoticed dawn of a new era takes place in Chicago in December, when the first nuclear chain reaction takes place. A woman joins the Irregulars for a drink for the first time. Edith Meiser is honored and toasted at the BSI dinner’s cocktail hour as the living avatar of Irene Adler — and then sent off about her business, as the boys go in to dinner. But the event begins the Irregular tradition known as The Woman, to be carried on in 1943 with no less striking a figure than Gypsy Rose Lee. 1944: The Allies land in Normandy in June, and begin their drive toward Germany. In October, Douglas MacArthur begins the liberation of the Philippines. Americans are confident of victory now, but the war has exacted its price: a changing American mood is reflected by the death of screwball comedy, and the rise of brooding films like Gaslight, Laura, and Double Indemnity. In obscure parts of the New Mexican desert, something called the Manhattan Project is underway. At the annual dinner in January, the BSI confers its first Titular Investitures, denoting “Adventures in Membership” in the Baker Street Irregulars. Among the illustrious first dozen are the Morley Brothers, Edgar W. Smith, Vincent Starrett, and Julian Wolff. But sixty canonical story titles soon proves too few for the burgeoning club, and a broader and longer list of Canonical Investitures evolves. And in March, the BSI’s unique “Trilogy” dinner is held at the Murray Hill Hotel to celebrate publication of three landmark books: Profile by Gaslight, Edgar W. Smith’s anthology of BSI Writings About the Writings; Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship, Christopher Morley’s groundbreaking version of an annotated Canon; and The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen’s collection of parodies and pastiches. In charge of the arrangements for the Trilogy Dinner is Lee Wright, Smith’s editor at Simon & Schuster. Put out at having been turned out onto the street at the end of last January’s BSI cocktail hour, when she was The Woman, she makes sure every Irregular at the Trilogy Dinner has a woman seated on either side of him. 1946: Harry Truman is President now, following FDR’s death the year before. The war is over, the GIs are coming home, and Americans are wondering what to do about the atom bomb. No doubt the new United Nations will take care of that, with the cooperation of our gallant Soviet ally. Rogers and Hammerstein are revolutionizing American musical theater on Broadway, and a bittersweet movie about veterans returning home, The Best Years of Our Lives, is beating out all competition for the top Oscars. At the BSI dinner, the premiere issue of The Baker Street Journal is handed out. It will be published by bookseller Ben Abramson, with Edgar Smith as editor-in-chief, to provide an outlet for the growing body of Writings About the Writings. Adrian Conan Doyle objects furiously, and demands that the BSJ cease. Ben Abramson and Edgar Smith refuse. When Viking Press asks Edgar Smith to edit a Portable Sherlock Holmes, Adrian denies permission to use any stories protected by copyright unless the BSJ is killed off, for good. But Edgar Smith refuses again. The BSJ proves too ambitious in any event, dying several years later when Ben Abramson can no longer carry the loss. But a few years after that, Edgar Smith will revive it in a new format, and edit it brilliantly through the ’Fifties. 1947: America enters the post-war era. The GI Bill sends millions of veterans to college, television gets ready to begin broadcasting, the personal automobile heralds the rise of the consumer society, and Jackie Robinson joins the Brooklyn Dodgers. Stalin tightens his grip on Eastern Europe, and the Cold War begins to stir. At the January dinner, where Christopher Morley now knows fewer people than ever, he is infuriated by Allen Robertson of Baltimore going around asking people for autographs. By June, Morley is telling Irregulars that there will never be another BSI dinner. Edgar W. Smith finally cancels plans for the next BSI dinner, in favor of a “committee-in-camera” crisis meeting in January ’48, humoring Chris Morley to keep the BSI alive. The ’48 evening is at New York’s Racquet Club, for the Murray Hill Hotel, a relic of the Victorian age, has finally been torn down. And the evening is smaller. But otherwise, it is impossible to distinguish from a regular BSI dinner. Morley stays away, but his anger subsides, and the BSI goes on. 1960: The ’Fifties are ending. Dwight Eisenhower is preparing to leave the White House after two terms. People are getting over their shock at Peyton Place. Rock and roll is defying predictions of an early demise. America is in a race for space with the Soviet Union, the civil rights movement is getting into full gear, and to many, John F. Kennedy’s election seems to be the harbinger of a new era called Camelot. Retired from General Motors since 1954, Edgar Smith has kept himself busy as a respected adviser in the field of international trade. But in September, while preparing to sail for Europe on business, Smith suddenly dies from a cerebral hemorrhage. The BSI is stunned by the loss — Christopher Morley has already died, back in 1957 — and it casts about for new leadership. It quickly settles on Julian Wolff, who succeeds Edgar Smith as the BSI’s Commissionaire for the next two and a half decades. 1986: Ronald Reagan is in his second term as President. Interest rates are falling, but the deficit is rising. The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes, and so does Chernobyl. After 40 years of Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise in Moscow holds out hope for a new era of reduced tensions, as the Statue of Liberty celebrates its 100th birthday. A greatly acclaimed Julian Wolff retires as Commissionaire of the BSI, in favor of Thomas L. Stix, Jr., as Wiggins. With few tears, the BSI abandons the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where it has dined for some fifteen increasingly crowded years, for somewhat smaller dinners at 24 Fifth Avenue. There the rule will be, in Stix’s words, Sherlockian bottoms in Sherlockian seats. 1992: The Cold War unexpectedly collapses: a coup in Moscow intended to roll back reform is defied by Gorbachev’s democratic rival, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin takes over, and proceeds to awe the world by outlawing the Communist Party and dismantling the Soviet Union. But in spite of that millennial event, and an easy victory in the Gulf War, George Bush’s hopes for re-election falter. When Ross Perot launches a spoiler campaign for the White House, Billary Clinton wins with only 43% of the vote. Some Sherlockian bottoms are shapelier than others: women finally join the BSI. Half a dozen women receive investitures in January 1991, including the redoubtable Edith Meiser and, from nearly sixty years ago, Sherlock Holmes Crossword solver Katherine MacMahon. And in January ’92, over a dozen of the sex that was Watson’s department attend the BSI dinner. Though the foundations of certain BSI scion societies quiver — you know who you are — the earth continues to turn on its axis, the sun continues to rise in the east and set in the west, and Baker Street Irregularity goes on. It was fun, but a few corrections: 1934: I’ve become not at all sure that Alexander Woollcott was not expected at the first annual dinner by Christopher Morley — see Q&A no. 5 at Ask Thucydides! 1936: Starrett was in the Far East not as the Chicago Tribune correspondent, but on a year-long round-the-world trip of his own. 1992: In the end, those scion societies didn’t quiver very much or very long; see Q&A no. 6 at Ask Thucydides! Return to About Me Return to Welcome page

THE MARCH OF TIME

Written by Jon Lellenberg

Performed at the BSI cocktail party,

24 Fifth Avenue, New York City, January 8, 1994,

by Jon Lellenberg and Clint Gould

The early ’30s: Prohibition and Depression, gangsters and G-men. Vitaphone in the movie houses, Herbert Hoover in the White House, and Americans in speakeasies.

Christopher Morley’s Three Hours for Lunch Club knows some speakeasies too. In one of them it begets the Grillparzer Sittenpolizei Verein, which finds itself becoming more and more Sherlockian as it drinks, dines and talks the hours away

BSI Archive; photo by Dorothy Stix, BSI

in Christ Cella’s back room on East 45th Street. Sherlock Holmes is in the air in the early ’Thirties. The last of A. Conan Doyle’s stories have been published. Doubleday Doran brings out The Complete Sherlock Holmes, with a memorable introduction by Chris Morley. William Gillette is completing his Farewell Tour of Sherlock Holmes, Clive Brook, Arthur Wontner and others are portraying Holmes in the movies, and Edith Meiser is dramatizing the Great Detective’s adventures on radio.

1933: Al Capone goes to jail. FDR offers America a New Deal. Ernest Hemingway displaces F. Scott Fitzgerald as America’s leading novelist. A newcomer named Katherine Hepburn wins the Academy Award for Best Actress in Morning Glory. And in December, America gets what it wants for Christmas: the end of Prohibition.

In October, a Chicago writer named Vincent Starrett publishes an unusual sort of biography called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The time is ripe for sodality — even whisky and sodality, says Christopher Morley — and the idea of a club called the Baker Street Irregulars occurs to Starrett in Chicago and Morley in New York simultaneously.

1934: The cocktail is king again. The birth of screwball comedy, Carole Lombard’s 20th Century, signals an uplift in the national mood. The Rainbow Room opens atop the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center. And Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night sweeps the Oscars. The only item of real interest from abroad is the Prince of Wales’ scandalous romance with Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

Christopher Morley acts before Starrett, on January 6th, founding the BSI with a birthday party for Sherlock Holmes at the Hotel Duane in the East ’Thirties. Soon after he announces its birth in the Saturday Review of Literature, Elmer Davis’s Constitution and Buy-Laws for the BSI appear there as well, followed in May by Frank V. Morley’s Sherlock Holmes Crossword as the BSI’s membership exam. (Quite a few women solve the Crossword; but only men are invited to the BSI dinners to come that year.)

On June 5th, the BSI holds dinner upstairs at Christ Cella’s, sending greetings to the first meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society in London, at Canuto’s restaurant in Baker Street on June 6th. And on December 7th, irregularly, the first annual dinner of the BSI takes place. Present besides Morley, his Grillparzer friends, and some Crossword winners, are Archie Macdonell, founder of England’s Sherlock Holmes Society; Vincent Starrett from Chicago, Gray Chandler Briggs from St. Louis, and H. W. Bell from Boston; William Gillette and Frederic Dorr Steele; and Alexander Woollcott, the Algonquin Round-Table’s enfant terrible — definitely not Christopher Morley’s favorite person. Innocently invited that night by Vincent Starrett, Woollcott proceeds to outrage almost everyone there, and afterwards publishes a mocking report of the event for The New Yorker.

1936: Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, and London and Paris embark upon appeasement. At home, FDR wins a second term as most Americans clamor for neutrality abroad. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance their way across the silver screen. The country goes wild when Benny Goodman’s band introduces swing one night at an L.A. ballroom. And a genteel lady in Georgia publishes a novel called Gone With the Wind.

The BSI holds its second annual dinner that January, then sinks into four long years of hibernation. But later this year, a General Motors executive in New York named Edgar W. Smith reads The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and writes an enthusiastic letter of appreciation to its author. He will have to wait nearly a year for a reply, since Vincent Starrett is away, in China, as the Chicago Tribune correspondent in Peking.

1940: War is underway in Europe now: Germany conquers France, Winston Churchill moves into 10 Downing Street and hurls defiance at Berlin, the RAF wins the Battle of Britain, and FDR wins a third term, despite his pledge to turn a nervous America into the Arsenal of Democracy.

In January, thanks to Edgar Smith’s persistence, the BSI is revived. The 1940 dinner is the most luminous ever: the Murray Hill Hotel ushers in a Golden Age of Irregular sodality and scholarship there. It is Edgar Smith’s first dinner, marking the commencement of his invaluable service as the BSI’s Buttons-cum-Commissionaire for the next twenty years; it is the only time that all three Morley brothers are present; and it is a publication party for the first collection of BSI writings, 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, edited by Vincent Starrett. Even a Conan Doyle is there that night. Denis gives a charming talk, but where his father’s memory is concerned, he leaves that night with an impression of Irregular irreverence that leads to a feud between the BSI and Sir Arthur’s sons.

1942: America reels, then recovers from the attack at Pearl Harbor, and sends the pride of the Japanese Navy to the bottom of the sea at the Battle of Midway in June. Irregulars get into uniform and march off to war. Even Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in movies and radio is mobilized. Jimmy Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy lifts American spirits, while the unnoticed dawn of a new era takes place in Chicago in December, when the first nuclear chain reaction takes place.

A woman joins the Irregulars for a drink for the first time. Edith Meiser is honored and toasted at the BSI dinner’s cocktail hour as the living avatar of Irene Adler — and then sent off about her business, as the boys go in to dinner. But the event begins the Irregular tradition known as The Woman, to be carried on in 1943 with no less striking a figure than Gypsy Rose Lee.

1944: The Allies land in Normandy in June, and begin their drive toward Germany. In October, Douglas MacArthur begins the liberation of the Philippines. Americans are confident of victory now, but the war has exacted its price: a changing American mood is reflected by the death of screwball comedy, and the rise of brooding films like Gaslight, Laura, and Double Indemnity. In obscure parts of the New Mexican desert, something called the Manhattan Project is underway.

At the annual dinner in January, the BSI confers its first Titular Investitures, denoting “Adventures in Membership” in the Baker Street Irregulars. Among the illustrious first dozen are the Morley Brothers, Edgar W. Smith, Vincent Starrett, and Julian Wolff. But sixty canonical story titles soon proves too few for the burgeoning club, and a broader and longer list of Canonical Investitures evolves.

And in March, the BSI’s unique “Trilogy” dinner is held at the Murray Hill Hotel to celebrate publication of three landmark books: Profile by Gaslight, Edgar W. Smith’s anthology of BSI Writings About the Writings; Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship, Christopher Morley’s groundbreaking version of an annotated Canon; and The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen’s collection of parodies and pastiches. In charge of the arrangements for the Trilogy Dinner is Lee Wright, Smith’s editor at Simon & Schuster. Put out at having been turned out onto the street at the end of last January’s BSI cocktail hour, when she was The Woman, she makes sure every Irregular at the Trilogy Dinner has a woman seated on either side of him.

1946: Harry Truman is President now, following FDR’s death the year before. The war is over, the GIs are coming home, and Americans are wondering what to do about the atom bomb. No doubt the new United Nations will take care of that, with the cooperation of our gallant Soviet ally. Rogers and Hammerstein are revolutionizing American musical theater on Broadway, and a bittersweet movie about veterans returning home, The Best Years of Our Lives, is beating out all competition for the top Oscars.

At the BSI dinner, the premiere issue of The Baker Street Journal is handed out. It will be published by bookseller Ben Abramson, with Edgar Smith as editor-in-chief, to provide an outlet for the growing body of Writings About the Writings. Adrian Conan Doyle objects furiously, and demands that the BSJ cease. Ben Abramson and Edgar Smith refuse. When Viking Press asks Edgar Smith to edit a Portable Sherlock Holmes, Adrian denies permission to use any stories protected by copyright unless the BSJ is killed off, for good. But Edgar Smith refuses again. The BSJ proves too ambitious in any event, dying several years later when Ben Abramson can no longer carry the loss. But a few years after that, Edgar Smith will revive it in a new format, and edit it brilliantly through the ’Fifties.

1947: America enters the post-war era. The GI Bill sends millions of veterans to college, television gets ready to begin broadcasting, the personal automobile heralds the rise of the consumer society, and Jackie Robinson joins the Brooklyn Dodgers. Stalin tightens his grip on Eastern Europe, and the Cold War begins to stir.

At the January dinner, where Christopher Morley now knows fewer people than ever, he is infuriated by Allen Robertson of Baltimore going around asking people for autographs. By June, Morley is telling Irregulars that there will never be another BSI dinner. Edgar W. Smith finally cancels plans for the next BSI dinner, in favor of a “committee-in-camera” crisis meeting in January ’48, humoring Chris Morley to keep the BSI alive. The ’48 evening is at New York’s Racquet Club, for the Murray Hill Hotel, a relic of the Victorian age, has finally been torn down. And the evening is smaller. But otherwise, it is impossible to distinguish from a regular BSI dinner. Morley stays away, but his anger subsides, and the BSI goes on.

1960: The ’Fifties are ending. Dwight Eisenhower is preparing to leave the White House after two terms. People are getting over their shock at Peyton Place. Rock and roll is defying predictions of an early demise. America is in a race for space with the Soviet Union, the civil rights movement is getting into full gear, and to many, John F. Kennedy’s election seems to be the harbinger of a new era called Camelot.

Retired from General Motors since 1954, Edgar Smith has kept himself busy as a respected adviser in the field of international trade. But in September, while preparing to sail for Europe on business, Smith suddenly dies from a cerebral hemorrhage. The BSI is stunned by the loss — Christopher Morley has already died, back in 1957 — and it casts about for new leadership. It quickly settles on Julian Wolff, who succeeds Edgar Smith as the BSI’s Commissionaire for the next two and a half decades.

1986: Ronald Reagan is in his second term as President. Interest rates are falling, but the deficit is rising. The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes, and so does Chernobyl. After 40 years of Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise in Moscow holds out hope for a new era of reduced tensions, as the Statue of Liberty celebrates its 100th birthday.

A greatly acclaimed Julian Wolff retires as Commissionaire of the BSI, in favor of Thomas L. Stix, Jr., as Wiggins. With few tears, the BSI abandons the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where it has dined for some fifteen increasingly crowded years, for somewhat smaller dinners at 24 Fifth Avenue. There the rule will be, in Stix’s words, Sherlockian bottoms in Sherlockian seats.

1992: The Cold War unexpectedly collapses: a coup in Moscow intended to roll back reform is defied by Gorbachev’s democratic rival, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin takes over, and proceeds to awe the world by outlawing the Communist Party and dismantling the Soviet Union. But in spite of that millennial event, and an easy victory in the Gulf War, George Bush’s hopes for re-election falter. When Ross Perot launches a spoiler campaign for the White House, Billary Clinton wins with only 43% of the vote.

Some Sherlockian bottoms are shapelier than others: women finally join the BSI. Half a dozen women receive investitures in January 1991, including the redoubtable Edith Meiser and, from nearly sixty years ago, Sherlock Holmes Crossword solver Katherine MacMahon. And in January ’92, over a dozen of the sex that was Watson’s department attend the BSI dinner. Though the foundations of certain BSI scion societies quiver — you know who you are — the earth continues to turn on its axis, the sun continues to rise in the east and set in the west, and Baker Street Irregularity goes on.

It was fun, but a few corrections:

1934: I’ve become not at all sure that Alexander Woollcott was not expected at the first annual dinner by Christopher Morley — see Q&A no. 5 at Ask Thucydides!

1936: Starrett was in the Far East not as the Chicago Tribune correspondent, but on a year-long round-the-world trip of his own.

1992: In the end, those scion societies didn’t quiver very much or very long; see Q&A no. 6 at Ask Thucydides!

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