Doc: Marine biologist, pioneering ecologist, and intellectual polymath Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (1887-1948) was the model for Steinbeck's fictional Doc. Steinbeck's portrayal of Doc is often biographically accurate regarding Ricketts's physical gestures and appearance, his personal habits and tastes, and his cultural interests (especially in music, literature, and philosophy). Steinbeck embroiders, too: Ricketts attended the University of Chicago (1919-22) but never graduated, whereas his fictional counterpart holds a PhD from that institution. The research award Doc receives from Old Jingleballicks in chapter 37 may have been compensation for Ricketts's failure at winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. On the other side, in order to emphasize Doc's romantic adventures, Steinbeck ignores Ricketts's role as a husband and a father to three children from his marriage to Anna "Nan" Maker in 1922. (The couple later separated but were never legally divorced.) "Half-Christ and half-goat," Steinbeck summed him up in his 1951 elegy "About Ed Ricketts," itself an exercise in paradox, selective memory, and impressionism. Steinbeck's eighteen-year relationship with Ricketts was profoundly beneficial, as Richard Astro established in John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts (1973). Besides their collaborative book, Sea of Cortez (1941), Steinbeck drew on Ricketts's ideas so deeply and so often that after Ricketts's death in May 1948, Steinbeck told mutual friends in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1976): "Wouldn't it be interesting if Ed was us. And that now there wasn't any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him. I've wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which" (p. 316). Excellent resources with which to survey the world of Ed Ricketts are Katharine A. Rodger's Renaissance Man of Cannery Row (2002) and her Breaking Through (2006), as well as Eric Enno Tamm's Beyond the Outer Shores (2004).
Old Jingleballicks: Eccentric Old Jay's prototype has never been positively identified by scholars, though it is possible he was in some way connected with Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, perhaps its onetime director W. K. Fisher, who was initially critical of the quality and nature of Ricketts's scientific work. In "About Ed Ricketts" (1951), Steinbeck says only that Ricketts "hated one professor whom he referred to as 'old jingleballicks.' It never developed why he hated 'old jingleballicks'" (p. xviii).
Western Biological Laboratories: Doc's business was modeled on Edward F. Ricketts's Pacific Biological Laboratories, cofounded in 1923 in Pacific Grove with Albert Galigher (his former University of Chicago roommate). In the late 1920s, Ricketts, by then the lab's sole owner, moved the business to 740 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey. Later, the street was renumbered, then renamed, with Ricketts's lab becoming 800 Cannery Row. The building, now a private social club, still stands. Recently it received a California Governor's Historic Preservation Award.
our victory: Victories by Allied forces over Germany and Japan that ended World War II took place in May and August 1945.
Palace Flop house: A shed, once owned by Horace Abbeville and used to store fish meal, that figures prominently in Cannery Row (1945). The Palace Flop house was deeded to Chinese merchant Lee Chong as payment for a grocery debt.
"Rock of Ages...St. James Infirmary": "Rock of Ages" (1776) written by Augustus M. Toplady; "Asleep in the Deep" (1897) written by Arthur J. Lamb, with melody by Henry W. Petrie; "St. James Infirmary," a folk song of indeterminate authorship, was recorded by many artists, including Louis Armstrong in 1928.
Bear Flag: The Bear Flag, so named because it featured a grizzly bear (once native to California), was raised at Sonoma, California, on June 14, 1846, by a group of American settlers led by Captain John C. Fremont in a revolt against Mexican rule. In 1911 California's state legislature adopted it as the state flag.
G.I. bill: The popular name for the Ser viceman's Readjustment Act (1944), which provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans.
Fort Ord: Originally called Camp Gigling when it was established in 1917, the Fort Ord Military Reservation (1940-94) was located on the Monterey Bay Peninsula between Marina and Sand City. At more than twenty-seven thousand acres, it was one of the largest U.S. Army bases on the West Coast and housed as many as fifty thousand troops. After World War II it became a facility for basic combat and advanced infantry training. Part of the base is now the site of California State University, Monterey Bay.
Point Pinos: Located at the northern end of the Monterey Peninsula, Point Pinos was named by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602. It became the site of the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the West Coast (established in 1855).
CHAPTER 2
egg-heady: Highly academic, intellectual, or studious.
pachucos: Members of Mexican-American youth gangs in the southwestern United States from the 1930s to the 1950s. The pachuco style and culture originated in El Paso, Texas, but moved quickly westward and became especially prominent in East Los Angeles. Pachucos sported loose-fitting "zoot suits" (oversized trousers and jacket, with a characteristic broad felt hat), which presented an exaggerated version of gangster clothing of the 1930s. Pachucos spoke a unique dialect called Calo, a hybrid blend of formal Spanish with English and Gypsy words.
lagged with loaded pennies: Joseph and Mary may have used illegally weighted pennies for the coin toss that determined who would be first to break ("lag") at pool.
badger game...Spanish treasure: Illegal or unethical confidence games. The badger game, for instance, is a dishonest trick in which a person is lured into a compromising situation and then blackmailed.
Francois Villon: French poet, thief, and general vagabond (ca. 1431-ca. 1474).
muggles: A slang term for marijuana.
wetback: Derogatory name applied to undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. The term is thought originally to refer to people crossing the border by swimming across the Rio Grande. Generally, Steinbeck's use of racially charged terms such as "Chink" and "spick" reflects the attitudes and habits of his characters, not necessarily of the author. His attitude toward Mexican nationals--if not exactly fully realistic or authentic--is nonetheless generally positive and respectful, especially when it is noted that Sweet Thursday appeared during the same year the United States government's Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice launched Operation Wetback (1954), which targeted illegal Mexican nationals in the southwestern United States and eventually succeeded in deporting eighty thousand of them.
Espaldas Mojadas: Joseph and Mary's group is Wetbacks.
"Ven a Mi...que Llora": Spanish song titles: "Come to Me, My Sorrowful Girl," "Woman from San Luis," and "The Little White Cloud That Cries."
charro: The Spanish word for the colorful, even gaudy, traditional outfit of the Mexican cowboy.
I. O. O. F.: In de pen dent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization devoted to improving and elevating the condition of humanity through friendship, love, and truth. Derived from seventeenth-century British orders, the first American I.O.O.F. lodge was chartered in Baltimore, Mary land, in 1819. In 1851, membership was extended to women.
CHAPTER 3
Velella: Velella velella, commonly known as By-the-Wind Sailor or Purple Sail, is a jellyfish that resembles a miniature Portuguese mano'-war. Usually blue in color, these jellyfish travel by means of a small stiff sail that catches the wind. They can become stranded on beaches by the millions.
Sistine Choir: Recordings of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel Choir.
William Byrd: William Byrd (1540?-1623) was one of the most celebrated English composers of the Renaissance. His three famous masses (in Latin) were written between 1592 and 1595.
Faust of Goethe: German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's tragedy of a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles the devil in exchange for unlimited power. Part I was published in 1808 and revised in 1828-29; part II was published in 1832, the year Goethe died.
Art of the Fugue of J. S. Bach: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 O.S.-1750 N.S.) was a prolific German composer and organist of sacred and secular wo
rks for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments. His final (and unfinished) collection of fugues and canons was composed between 1745 and 1750, and published after his death in 1750. See below pp. 80, 135, and 201.
Diamond Jim Brady: James Buchanan Brady (1856-1917), American businessman, financier, and philanthropist of the Gilded Age, whose appetite for food was legendary.
Lao-Tse: Major Chinese philosopher said to have lived in the sixth century BCE; however, many historians place his life in the fourth century BCE. He was credited with writing the seminal Taoist work, the Tao Te Ching, and he was recognized as the founder of Taoism.
Bhagavadgita: The Bhagavad Gita is a passage of 701 verses in the epic Mahabharata and is revered as a sacred text of Hindu philosophy. Bhagavad Gita, a conversation between divine Krishna and Arjuna, proposes that true enlightenment comes from growing beyond identification with the Ego, the little Self, and that one must identify with the Truth of the immortal Self (the soul, or Atman), the ultimate Divine Consciousness. Through detachment from the personal Ego, the Yogi, or follower of a particular path of Yoga, is able to transcend his mortality and attachment from the material world, and see the Infinite.
Prophet Isaiah: Jewish prophet (eighth-seventh centuries BCE) who prophesied during the reigns of four biblical kings and is generally regarded to have authored the Book of Isaiah, which delivers messages of peace, compassion, and justice.
Dr. Horace Dormody: In 1930, Dr. Horace Dormody (1897-1984), with his brother Dr. Hugh Dormody, opened Peninsula Community Hospital (renamed Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula in 1961).
Great Tide Pool: An especially rich ecological zone and consequently one of Doc's prime specimen collecting sites. It is located off Monterey's Ocean View Boulevard at the western foot of the Point Pinos light house. In chapter 4 of Cannery Row, Steinbeck wrote:
It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.
kraken: Legendary tentacled sea monster of gargantuan size, perhaps inspired by giant squid.
Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species: Steinbeck is creating a myth here. According to Brian Railsback in Parallel Expeditions (1995),
Darwin never claimed his theory "flashed complete" in such a way. However, the inductive process the novelist suggests, in which a theory emerges after a gathering of facts, does indicate his knowledge of Darwin's method. Further, Steinbeck is essentially correct in stating that the naturalist spent the rest of his life "backing it up" (Darwin produced six editions of The Origin of Species in his lifetime, the last in 1872, ten years before his death). (p. 26)
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"Stormy Weather": Blues song written by musician Harold Arlen (1905-86) and lyricist Ted Koehler (1894-1973) in 1933, about a heartbroken woman who has lost her man. Its first stanza sets the tone for the whole song: "Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky / Stormy weather, since my man and I ain't together / Keeps raining all the time." Ethel Waters first sang it at the Cotton Club in Harlem, but it was also memorably performed by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lena Horne, who sang it in the movie of the same name in 1943. In 2004 it was chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.
Jack Dempsey: William Harrison Dempsey (1895-1983). World heavyweight boxing champion (1919-26) known as the "Manassa Mauler." Fifty of his sixty wins were by knockout.
spick: Insulting, derogatory term for a Hispanic person.
CHAPTER 8
The Great Roque War: An American variant of croquet (the name was derived by removing the first and last letters), roque is played on a rolled sand court with permanently anchored wickets. The mallets, with which the ball is struck, have a short handle (approximately twenty-four inches), and the ends of the mallet are faced with stone. According to Susan Shillinglaw's A Journey into Steinbeck's California (2006), "There was no such war, with Greens squaring off against Blues," though in 1932-33 a local tempest erupted in Pacific Grove over attempts to remove the roque courts. Voters resoundingly defeated the move (p. 95).
Pacific Grove: Sedate Pacific Grove, Monterey's next-door neighbor on the Peninsula, began in 1875 as a summer Methodist tent camp and religious retreat (on property owned by land baron David Jack), then in 1879 became the site of a Pacific Coast arm of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, modeled on the Methodist Sunday school teachers' training camp established in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, New York. Pacific Grove's roots, as Steinbeck notes, were religiously, philosophically, and politically conservative.
CHAPTER 9
Whom the Gods Love...: Parody of a line by Greek tragic dramatist Euripides (480 BCE-406 BCE): "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."
Sorrows of Werther: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), loosely autobiographical novel of love and suicide by German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
A and C: "Ass and collar"--a bouncer's move, used to grab hold of and then eject a patron. Steinbeck mentions the technique in chapter 23 of Cannery Row as well.
Jackson fork: A mechanical hay fork, used for lifting large amounts of hay.
William Henry Harrison: Harrison (1773-1841) was an American military leader, a politician, and the ninth president of the United States (1841), who died thirty days into his term--the briefest presidency in U.S. history and the first U.S. president to die while in office.
Quod erat demonstrandum: Latin for "that which was to be demonstrated," indicating that something has been clearly proven. Its acronym, Q.E.D., often appears at the conclusion of mathematical proofs.
CHAPTER 10
Harun al-Rashid: Harun (ca. 763-809), fifth Abbasid caliph, who ruled from 786 to 809, was a munificent patron of letters and arts, and under him Baghdad was at its apogee. He became a great figure to the Arabs, who tell about him in many of the stories of the Thousand and One Nights.
djinni: In Arabian and Muslim mythology, djinni, or jinni, are intelligent spirits of lower rank than the angels. They are able to appear in human and animal forms and to possess humans.
yerba buena tea: Yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii) is a sprawling aromatic herb of the western and northwestern United States, western Canada, and Alaska, and is used to make tea that is both a medicinal and a refreshing drink. Its name, an alternate form of hierba buena, which means "good herb," was given by the Spanish priests of California.
CHAPTER 11
Holman's Department Store: According to the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History (www.pgmuseum.org), this landmark Pacific Grove store was started in 1891, when R. Luther Holman bought Towle's dry goods store on Light house Avenue near Seventeenth Street. By 1924, when the store moved over two blocks to its new location at 524 Light house Avenue, son Wilford Holman was in charge of operations. Holman's Department Store, with more than forty different departments, was the largest store on the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Highway 68, also known as the Holman Highway, was built in part to bring customers to its doors. The store, having hired a flagpole skater to promote business, appears in chapter nineteen of Cannery Row.
"lets concealment...his damask cheek": Mack quoting Shakespeare is one of the incongruous comedic effects Steinbeck strove for in Sweet Thursday. Spoken by Viola in act II, scene 4, line 111 of William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will (ca. 1601-02):
"A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?"
Lefty Grove: Robert Moses (Lefty) Grove, one of the greatest pitcher
s in major-league baseball history. Grove (1900-75) retired in 1941 with a career record of 300-141. His .680 lifetime winning percentage is eighth all-time, but none of the seven men ahead of him won more than 236 games. Grove was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947. In 1999, he was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
absinthe: A distilled, highly alcoholic, anise-flavored spirit derived from herbs including the flowers and leaves of the medicinal plant wormwood (Artemisia absinthium).
Woolworth's: The F. W. Woolworth Company was a nationwide retail corporation whose five-and-dime stores became a nearly universal presence in America. The first Woolworth's store was founded in 1878 by Frank Winfield Woolworth; the chain closed in 1997.