Our Founding Chair, Don Yates, has received the following award from the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections:
The 2013 Dr Bryce L. Crawford, Jr. Award for an outstanding essay in the tradition of the purist form of scholarship was presented in absentia to Dr Donald A. Yates, BSI for his article “Sherlockian Memories” which appeared in the September 2012 issue of the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections Newsletter.
Announcement of the award was made by Richard Sveum, MD, JHWS “Marco,” BSI “Doctor Hill Barton,” President of the Friends of Sherlock Holmes Collections. Dr Sveum commented:
“Congratulations, you were given the Bryce Crawford, Jr. Award at the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Annual Membership Meeting held in conjunction with the triennial Minnesota conference, Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Place. The award is given to the best article published in the Friends Newsletter in the last year. You will be sent the certificate by mail. There were over 140 people attending the conference and we were sorry that you had to be awarded it in absentia. We did highlight your ongoing work with the John H Watson Society and that organization’s generosity to the University of Minnesota.
Bryce Crawford was a distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota and a founder of the Norwegian Explorers who like to say that Sherlockian scholarship was the purist form of scholarship, no money, no academic advancement, just pure love of the subject. ”
The Society congratulates Prof Yates on his award and is pleased to reprint the article in its entirety for our members to enjoy. Reprinted courtesy of University of Minnesota Libraries. Sherlock Holmes Collections; first appearing in “Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections Newsletter”, Volume 16, Number 3:
Sherlockian Memories
I have just read Alexander Woollcott’s essay, “The Baker Street Irregulars,” which first appeared in The New Yorker over seventy-five years ago (December 29, 1934) and was later included under the heading of “Shouts and Murmurs V” in Woollcott’s Long, Long Ago (New York: Macmillan, 1943). The spirit of the B.S. I, as I have come to know it, is magically evoked by Woollcott in this essay. I recall that this same rollicking, pseudo-serious tone was somehow transferred intact to the gatherings of the Amateur Mendicant Society that I began attending in Detroit in the mid-fifties. That mood was lovingly evoked by Russell McLauchlin and Robert Harris, the group’s leaders.
In 1956 I presented a paper to the Mendicants entitled, “A Final Illumination of the Lucca Code.” Russ McLauchlin like it and suggested that I submit it for possible publication in the Baker Street Journal, then edited by Edgar Smith. Smith wrote back that he wanted it for the magazine and I received a total of six two-cent postcards from his leading up to the essay’s publication later that year. Smith was extremely friendly, outgoing and encouraging, making me feel very welcome to the Journal’s pages, urging me to subscribe and putting in a plug also for The Sherlock Holmes Journal. The following year he enthusiastically accepted a crossword puzzle that I had constructed, based on The Hound of the Baskervilles.
When I moved from suburban Farmington, outside Detroit, to East Lansing in 1957 and resurrected the Greek Interpreters of East Lansing, which Page Heldenbrand had founded in 1945, I carried the style of the Mendicant gatherings with me and passed it on effortlessly to the faithful there who joined in our celebrations of Baker Street for a period of more than two decades.
I wrote Smith about the Intrepreters’ resuscitation dinner, and he wrote again, indicating that “As representing a full-fledge Scion, you are now eligible to send a delegate to the Annual Dinner.” Of course I went.
So in January of 1960, when I attended that first Baker Street Irregulars dinner in New York City, I discovered —perhaps not to my surprise but to my wonderment—a reverent and at the same time playful mood that was identical to that I had encountered at the gatherings of the Detroit Mendicants. We met that night at Cavanaugh’s Restaurant, at 258 West Twenty-Third, where, as Edgar noted in my invitation, “the penalty is sixteen dollars, and the rewards will be out of proportion. Old Irregular Rex Stout will be the Gasogene’s chair.”
I have to say that my association with the bright and witty people who share a singular regard for Baker street and its two most famous roomers has been one of the keenest pleasures of my lifetime. That night I met and talked with—among others—Edgar, of course, Rex Stout, Basil Davenport, H. W. Starr, Thomas McDade, Ernest Zeisler, Howard Haycraft, and Earle Walbridge. It was a wonderful evening: filled with the singular delights previously enjoyed in the company of the Mendicants, but now somehow raised to a more intense level.
I also met for the first and only time Page Heldenbrand, one of the youngest of the Irregulars, whose life was sadly so brief. It was he who had preceded me—as a student at Michigan State back in the mid-forties–as the founder and moving force behind the short-lived Greek Interpreters of East Lansing. Since the group met first in 1945 it thus qualified as the fourth or fifth such group to be established in the U.S. It was, in any case the first of the many academic scions founded thereafter.
I had a long conversation that evening with Earle Walbridge, who, it turned out, was the curator of the magnificent library housed at the Harvard Club. I remember strolling with him afterwards as far as Gramercy Park, where he lived, engaged in a long chat about subjects Sherlockian. His gift that night was to make me feel as an equal among the luminaries I had rubbed elbows with at the dinner.
When in 1982 Joanne and I pulled up stakes and moved from East Lansing to St. Helena in California’s Napa Valley, we were greeted most cordially by Ted and Mary Schulz of San Rafael, and were welcomed to the gatherings of San Francisco’s scion, The Scowrers and Molly Maguires, which we have enjoyed for more than a quarter century.
In 1984, Joanne and I founded the Napa Valley Napoleons of S.H., a convivial group of Holmes admirers that thenceforth came together four times a year to greet the new seasons and to try out a new restaurant each time. (I want to point out that we followed this program out of a desire for variety and not because we were unwelcome at dining establishments where we had raised a ruckus before, restaurants whose other diners never failed to be astonished when around our dessert time some forty or fifty souls suddenly broke out with “God Save the Queen.”) One highlight that stands out in my memory was our S.H.-to-the-third-power dinner—Sherlock Holmes in Saint Helena at Sutter Home, an occasion celebrated at the winery’s Victorian mansion.
In April of 2004, our loyal members got together for dinner at St. Helena’s Pinot Blanc restaurant and that night lifted our glasses to the memory of twenty years of the Napoleons’ doings in our valley.
Now for a look back at my own beginnings. My introduction to the world of Sherlock Holmes came in 1944 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when my mother bought for me—as a gift on the occasion of my graduation from Slauson Junior High School—the Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I read through it, assiduously underlining
significant passages, making marginal notes, keeping track of all of Holmes’s disguises, all the unrecorded cases, the official police figures participating in each adventure, and so on. Why I attacked the Holmes stories in this way, I do not know. I suspect that I had become alerted to such particular features of Holmes’s universe in the head notes (composed by editor Fred Dannay) to the stories that were appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which I had discovered in 1943. Another possible source for this fascination with the minutiae of the Baker Street scene was Ellery Queen’s (Fred Dannay’s) anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (wonderful title!), published in 1944, along with two other books devoted to Holmes—Edgar Smith’s Profile by Gaslight (evocative title)—and Christopher Morley’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship, both also published in 1944. Somehow, at age 14 I was able to dig up the money and I bought all three of them.
These books were the cornerstones of the large collection of Sherlockiana that I assembled over the years, including Doyle first editions (English and American) of all the Holmes adventures (except, of course, for the Beeton’s appearance of A Study in Scarlet), many bound Strand magazines with Holmes tales, many works of criticism, complete runs of theSherlock Holmes Journal, The Baker Street Journal, The Baker Street Miscellanea and other periodicals, and a signed and inscribed copy of Doyle’s autobiography, Memories and Adventures.
I received my Titular Investiture in the Baker Street irregulars at the January, 1972, dinner. It was Will Oursler who proposed me for membership (which was the way things were handled in those days). When I heard him read the credentials for the recipient of the Investiture of “Mr. Melas,” I said to myself—being totally unprepared for this honor—“That sounds a lot like me.” And so it was. Later, when the Investiture of “The Greek Interpreter” became available, Julian Wolff, at my request, withdrew “Mr Melas” and bestowed the former title on me.
I have made many contributions to Sherlockian magazines—poetry, essays, articles, scion reports, obituaries and book reviews. At the B.S.I. dinners I have offered toasts and read papers and poetry composed for the occasion. And over the years I have enjoyed lasting friendships with many Sherlockians, one of the earliest of which (and most fondly remembered) was my acquaintanceship with Vincent Starrett of Chicago whom I visited on numerous occasions when my travels took me to that city. Cherished mementos of my decade-long association with him, one of the last great bookmen of the century past, are his handwritten letters, a signed photograph and a holograph transcription of his immortal sonnet, “221B,” with a dedication to me. It stands alone as the most prized and meaningful symbol of the pleasure I have taken from a life-long and unflagging admiration for Sherlock Holmes and enduring devotion to the saga of Baker Street.
Finally, I would like to describe what was for me a memorable—and possibly unique–occasion of Holmes-inspired theater that took place recently in St. Helena, the spiritual home of the Napa Valley Napoleons. For five years we have met at the Silverado Restaurant and Brewery on the second morning after Christmas to dispatch an appropriate goose dinner and commemorate the events of the Holmes adventure titled “The Blue Carbuncle”. Long in advance of the December 2010 gathering, I wrote a short story using as its setting the previous 2009 goose dinner and discussion of “The Blue Carbuncle”. I imagined a genial local chief of police and threw in speaking parts for a handful of identifiable Napoleons and put together a story that had the chief describing the details of a St. Helena murder case and, withholding the solution, challenged the group to solve the crime. I called the story “A Study in Scarlatti,” the latter being the name of the stabbing victim who was discovered murdered in the guest home of an estate winery.
Jasnet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, liked the story and agreed to run it in the next February issue (2011), which traditionally always carries some Holmes-related material. That issue was released in December in time for me to have some three-dozen copies sent for distribution at the dinner. Beforehand, I assigned the speaking parts to willing participants, so that that year’s meeting featured a dramatic reading of a story that had as its setting to the very circumstances in which it was being read. In its way, it was a very strange and dizzying experience. The non-speaking Napoleons enthusiastically joined in with appropriately timed gasps and applause and we all agreed that we had felt a very curious sense of other-worldliness. And everyone went home with a printed version of the events of the goose dinner that they had just participated in!
Donald A. Yates, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages from Michigan State University. He is a foremost translator and scholar of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer, and Dr Yates is currently at work on a new biography of Borges based on his personal friendship with him over many years. He and his lovely bride, Dr Joanne Yates, reside in St. Helena, California in the beautiful Napa Valley wine country.
